Winning the star wars - at £260 a week

Winning the star wars - at £260 a week

Famous actors won't get out of bed for him for anything more than Equity minimum wages. LUCY POWELL meets the Almeida Theatre's co-director Ian McDiarmid, aka the emperor of the whole known universe.

Lucy Powell
Features, October 1-7, 1999
Highbury & Islington Express

Ian McDiarmid as the emperor Palpatine in the Phantom Menace.

I recall that during a period of my childhood, as my mother vainly attempted to persuade me that two large buns stuck over my ears was really not the most flattering of intergalactic hairstyles, I had a series of harrowing nightmares about a character from Star Wars. It was the Emperor Palpatine, whose piercing blue eyes and cold, malignant voice had cowed even Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, who was the cause of my unrest.

Ian McDiarmid, of course, is a man far larger than the sum of his parts, even when the part in question is the Emperor of the Universe. Not only has he given acclaimed performances on stage and screen for nearly half a century, in productions as diverse as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Rebecca, but since he and Jonathan Kent took over from Pierre Audi as artistic directors of the Almeida, he has facilitated some of the finest, most dynamic theatre of the decade, in London and on tour around the world.

Looking at his achievements, you get the impression that had McDiarmid any more strings to his bow, he could single-handedly play all of Haydn's string quartets. While reciting Hamlet. Nevertheless, when I think of the steely determination and unshakeable resolve that emanate from him, it is his relatively minor role as Emperor Palpatine that springs, unbidden, to mind.

Then it dawns on me that these commanding qualities, requisite for conquering the Universe, are precisely the same qualities necessary for a daring and successful theatre director.

It is, perhaps, his steeliness that made McDiarmid unafraid to take on the role of Barabas in Marlowe's contentious, dazzling satire, The Jew of Malta, which opened yesterday at the Almeida, when no-one else has been prepared to perform it for 11 years.

When I ask him why he thinks the play has been neglected, he says: "There is a general lack of adventurousness around. These plays don't get done because people are afraid to take a risk, and we have never been afraid to do so."

Could it be, I venture, that the charge of anti-Semitism has frightened others away? McDiarmid responds with conviction. "Marlowe was so instinctively subversive and he was an atheist. So the play is a wonderful, blackly funny, anarchic attack on institutionalised hypocrisy, whether it's political or religious. And nobody escapes - Christians, Turks, Jews, politicians, they are all there to be held up to an amoral scrutiny.

"Barabas himself is also a fantastic character to play," he adds. "He's such a marvellously rich, exotic mongrel of a person. At the start of the play he has everything, and then, in about 10 seconds flat, he has nothing. Abandoned by everyone, including God, he has to take care of himself."

Michael Grandage directs the play, having successfully teamed up with McDiarmid before in Lulu, The Doctor's Dilemma and Edward II. McDiarmid obviously relishes the opportunity of working with him again. "The fact that Michael was an actor means that the bullshit factor is very low. You don't have to appease each other's personalities, you can just get on with the business in hand, and that's an enormous release."

In addition, McDiarmid observes that he is perfectly suited to the play: "He has a tremendous feeling for the pace and energy of the piece, but also his spirit, like mine, responds to the material. Marlowe's a great theatrical animal, and if you're a theatre person, which Michael absolutely is, you inevitably respond to it."

You get the impression that the pair of them will do everything in their power not to tame the "animal". I am reminded of Shaw's less complimentary description of Marlowe as "the true Elizabethan blank verse beast". It was a Shaw play that brought McDiarmid and Grandage together in 1990, a contradiction that delights McDiarmid. "As authors, they couldn't have been more different, but that is what is just so exciting. The theatre is all about leading you to expect one thing and showing you another, and the Jew of Malta itself is like that. This man, Barabas, does the most abominable things, and you ought to feel total repulsion towards him, yet, by the end, you rather like him. That's the theatre for you, it confuses morality."

Why is it, though, that McDiarmid seems drawn to play these abominable characters, time and again? His response is contemplative. "I don't know. Milton, a very religious man, fell in love with Satan in Paradise Lost, and I've played him too. The rejected, fallen outsider, like Richard III, Volpone, and Barabas, why are these evil characters so deeply attractive? It's an interesting question, and I am as keen as anyone else to ask it, but I don't have the answer."

Revisiting his most famous wicked creation in the Phantom Menace, was "immense fun", McDiarmid admits. Surprisingly, for such a perfectionist, he was unperturbed by the lukewarm reviews the film received. "My favourite line on criticism is that of the late Iris Murdoch, who said that a bad review is of as much interest to her as whether it's raining in Patagonia. That's a mantra that I try to live up to."

The phenomenal success of the Almeida can hardly have tried McDiarmid's mantra to its limits. In the 10 years since he and Kent made it home to a full-time producing company, the Almeida has accumulated a glittering array of accolades and glowing reviews for its ground-breaking productions, including an Olivier Award for outstanding achievement. McDiarmid, however, is far from complacent.

"We never sit back and think, 'We've made it,' because it's still a question of survival. We're not funded well, we have to raise every penny we can from individual and corporate sponsors, and we're reliant on actors coming to us for Equity minimum, so it could fall apart at any time. From the outside it looks as if the Almeida's a big success story and in many ways it is, but that doesn't solve the day-to-day business of surviving. Our plan for the millennium is to get through another year."

McDiarmid is aware, however, that the Almeida's first decade has been an extraordinary one. He swells with pride when talking of the company's achievements. "The Almeida's a unique building. It's got good ghosts. It's got a large stage but a small auditorium, so you can do works of scale but remain extremely close to your audience. And Islington itself has risen at the same time, I wouldn't say entirely due to the productions at the Almeida," he concedes with a self-conscious laugh, "but we seem to have gone hand-in-hand with the explosion of Upper Street. Now people don't have a problem travelling to Islington to see theatre, because it's a place they want to come to anyway, which is an enormous help. But in the end it all comes down to the will and the energy of the artists involved."

The singular atmosphere of the Almeida has attracted artists such as Juilette Binoche, Kevin Spacey and Ralph Fiennes, unconcerned at being paid the Equity minimum of £260 a week, Fiennes returns in the spring to perform Coriolanus and Richard II. The double-bill will head what McDiarmid describes as "the most exciting season we've done to date". He is determined that the Almeida will continue to grow and to produce challenging, contemporary theatre. He views the Fiennes project as an example of their high-risk strategy.

"Its a great opportunity for a great actor to play two sides of the Shakespearean personality, the masculine and the feminine, and I know he's relishing the prospect."

It may be, though, that we get to the heart of the Almeida's appeal when McDiarmid asks himself the central question: "We often get the most interesting people doing the smallest parts, and we pay them so very little. I mean, why do they come? They think they've got a chance of performing at their best, of acting at their peak, that's why they come."

If the overwhelming reception The Jew of Malta has had on tour is a guide, McDiarmid knows he is no exception. When he returns to his own stage, playing one of the most captivating characters in English literature, he will again have a rare chance to display his formidable talent for winning audiences over to the forbidden power and pleasures of the dark side.

At the Almeida until November 6. Box ofice: 0171-359 4404.

SPEB