Double Olivier Award winner Henry Goodman makes a welcome return to Bath this month to star as the compelling and often controversial artist Lucian Freud in Looking at Lucian as Alan Franks’ new play receives its world premiere at the Ustinov Studio – running until Saturday 2nd September – as part of the Theatre Royal’s Summer Season 2017
Henry Goodman’s extensive career includes seasons with the RSC and National Theatre. His awards include both the Olivier Award and Critics’ Circle Award for Best Actor for Trevor Nunn’s The Merchant of Venice, and the Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for Assassins. His many other acclaimed performances include Chicago, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Fiddler on the Roof and Guys and Dolls. Previously at the Theatre Royal, Henry has starred in Hysteria (in which he played Lucian Freud’s grandfather, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud), Broken Glass, Duet for One and The Birthday Party
What are you most enjoying about playing Lucian Freud in Looking at Lucian?
One thing that springs to mind is his unpredictability. He can be charming, then turn on a sixpence and be demanding and challenging and passionate, he can be dancing, he can be hilarious and then quite savage. That, of course, gives me lots of meat on the bone.
What challenges does a one-man show present?
I’ve done major roles but a one-man show is a very particular animal and this particular guy is a very special animal – with ‘animal’ being an apt word. But it’s exciting as well as challenging and actually it’s really a two-person show because there’s ‘a sitter’ who he is interacting with, who he is painting, and I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that she’s nude because he painted all these searingly truthful nudes. That’s the mode of the text, the story, and it’s hugely challenging but also hugely enjoyable – interacting with this woman, ‘who is seated in the audience’. It’ll be interesting to see the audience engaging and being a fly on the wall in that room, in that studio with him, as The Queen was and Jerry Hall and Kate Moss and hundreds of other famous and lesser-known people. He does enjoy a gossip about these famous people, which the sitter wants to know about, of course, as most people do.
What research have you done into him and is there anything you’ve found especially interesting or surprising to learn?
I didn’t know about the intensity of his emotional life. He’s infamous for the number of children he had and famous for it as well, plus for his relationships and wining and dining in very elegant restaurants and all of that. But I didn’t know some of the details and there’s also the juxtaposition of these two lives – coming from Germany as a young boy, escaping from the Nazis in Berlin before his famous grandfather did. It’s been a revelation finding out more about his relationship with Sigmund Freud and his brothers and indeed the sitters, some of whom were very well-known.
Why do you think he is so revered as an artist?
If you think about it he stuck to his guns to do figurative painting all through the years – and I’m talking decades when pop art and collage and all these new things were happening, with exciting artists who were in the colour supplements in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. He stuck to his guns; he was going to do figurative painting with an absolutely forensic commitment to capture a person’s being, their essence, rather than just doing portraits to get lots of customers. He was obsessive, yes, but also incredibly honest with himself and in the self-portraits he did. He also developed a technique of layering paint, which other artists explored in different ways like his good friend Frank Auerbach – who he felt was one of the best painters in Britain – and he was known for taking his time. So his fame, I think, comes not from his personal life but from his deep, deep commitment and need to forensically reveal – even if it was slightly brutal or ruthless at times – a sort of truth about people’s animal presence.
Are there aspects of his personality you can relate to?
I share an intense hunger to want theatre to be as meaningful as he wanted painting to be. Much as I’ve done Sir Humphrey in Yes, Prime Minister and musicals and all of that, I’ve also done a lot of other things – Shakespeare at the RSC, plays at the National, Angels in America in which I played Roy Cohn, Sigmund Freud in Hysteria, Duet for One – and I have an interest in the psychology of what makes a person tick. Apart from all the biographical stuff about Lucian, there’s an opportunity for me to get inside someone who is at the mercy of quite a few demons.
Is painting one of your own skills or hobbies?
To be honest, no. My daughter Carla paints well and indeed she’s designing the show. My wife is interested in painting too, but I don’t have that particular skill at all. But on stage I have the paints and the brushes and I am at the canvas creating this portrait – and with the lessons I’ve been taking with an artist I hope it will convince most of the people most of the time. Lucian makes brush strokes on the canvas and creates the portrait during the course of the play as he’s working on it.
You played Lucian’s grandfather Sigmund in Hysteria. How has that influenced your portrayal?
In the play there are references to his intense and troubled relationships with his family but one thing he vehemently deals with is not wanting to discuss his life. He never gave interviews, although very late in life he’d sit and chat with John Richardson and other people and there are various YouTube recordings he did with his assistant David Dawson. He was pretty scabrous. There was a writer for The Times, I think, who wanted to meet him and do an interview, but after reading some of her work he in no uncertain terms rather rudely said he’d rather drop dead. There was an intense privacy about him that goes with his intense focus. That’s why his portraits took so long. Even The Queen sat for something like four and a half months and it was not uncommon for him to take eight or ten months or even a year. He worked three sessions a day seven days a week so he clearly had an obsessive personality. As for Sigmund, I play on the fact Lucian’s deeply attached to him and horrified that anyone would assume because he’s Sigmund’s grandson that he’s a case. The assumed psychiatric thing irritates the hell out of him, but he was a very well-read man, very literate, and interested in personality. He was interested in the tactile presence of someone so it comes up a lot in the play – a debate about analysis and about how do we read a person, what’s hidden, when and how does it come out? He’s dealing with it through humour. He dances in the piece and he sings. He’s quite a guy. He was very physical. There’s a picture of him in his late-70s doing a handstand on a chair. Everyone, whether they liked him or loathed him, all attested to this sort of electric energy that he had when he was in the room. You couldn’t ignore him. The Freudian link is in the play a lot; it both irritates him and also provides a vocabulary with which he talks to the sitter.
Lucian was known for being controversial and outspoken and his work could be divisive. Are those things you’re drawing on to play him?
The way Alan Franks has written it, Lucian likes to mouth off about things. He’s feisty as he was in life. It’s not verbatim theatre, it’s not every word he spoke, but a huge percentage of it is exactly what he said. Then a structure has been added, the relationship with the sitter changes over the seasons, and I don’t want to give too much away but there’s a situational event that happens which becomes hugely dramatic in that relationship.
You’ve appeared at the Theatre Royal Bath several times. What do you enjoy about performing there?
I’ve done Hysteria in Bath and Broken Glass, the fascinating Arthur Miller play with a lot of Freudian links in it, as well as more lighthearted things. It’s always a lovely place to perform because it’s got a fantastically loyal and appreciative audience.
This time you’re appearing in the Ustinov Studio. Are you looking forward to performing in the more intimate space?
The intimacy of Lucian’s studio is a key thing so it’s wonderful to be in this studio theatre. We chose to do it here because it does feel like being in the room with him. People in Bath are willing to come and invest in an interesting piece of work and this is a brand new piece so Bath felt like an ideal place to premiere it. It was sent to me when I was at the RSC last year and it got under my skin. I shared it with Jonathan Church, who has been curating the season with Danny Moar, and we all felt it was an ideal project for the Ustinov. We’re very lucky to have this sort of fertile soil and tradition that the venue allows for, let alone the power of the intimate connection of a man in his studio. The intimate space also ties in with his technique. He would look at something or somebody for a long time before mixing a tone, doing one brush stroke, then it might be 20 minutes before the next one. In that time when he’s talking to the sitter he wants to put them at their ease, he’s sensual, he’s cheeky, he’s entertaining, but all the time he’s looking not just for the obvious things like light, tone and texture of flesh and skin but the quality of the relationship he can have with this person. That’s at the very root of the play; he has a need to have a relationship which sometimes there’s no question tipped over into an intimate sexual relationship with his sitters, although it wasn’t a given or an automatic thing. He preferred to work with people he knew. He didn’t want just anybody to wander in; there had to be a starting point, a connection.
With a world premiere does that bring extra responsibilities for you as an actor?
It does, yes, but the audiences in Bath have gotten well used to committing to new writing of a very high order. Both for the author, the director Tom Attenborough and myself it’s really thrilling because it’s not often you get the chance to create something absolutely brand new. Because it’s a one-man show obviously there’s a huge extra demand on me and the nature of the brushes I want to paint with as an actor. Because it’s so intimate it means there’s a sort of honesty and faithfulness and nakedness. And it’s got to be good theatre: it’s got to be entertaining no matter how serious or fascinating or challenging the man may be. That balance between the rise and fall of the different elements and the searing honesty that I have to work with for people to believe they’re in the room with him is really exciting but scary – but in a good way, you know?
How involved has the writer Alan Franks been in bringing his script to the stage?
He’s been amazing. He has written five or six studio plays before, but his main work for 30 years was as a journalist for The Times interviewing many very well-known people for in-depth articles. He’s used to sitting with Bob Dylan and all sorts of famous people, having done all the prep and research, so he’s able to capture this thing of reading someone. What’s different is making theatre of that in relation to this particular artist who he admires hugely and to look at the curve and the momentum of a short piece of theatre. With Tom and myself, we did some workshops on it over a month or two – discussing and trying out things, then he’d go away and reshape things. Because of his journalistic career he’s also very quick. We shared our theatre experience, his journalistic experience and his experience of working on his other plays. Because it’s a one-man show it’s essential to have that dialogue about the rise and fall of the thing. It’s like doing a chamber concert, where you have to agree with the other musicians on ‘When are we going to breathe? When should there be more drama?’ so that even when somebody is playing a delicate, witty counterpoint to you you’re all the same page about other things that bind you together. Although I’m on stage I’m very much nurtured by that detailed process that Tom Attenborough, his assistant director Mel and Alan spent round a table, especially given that Lucian can go from a beautiful Thomas Hardy poem to a savage attack about things that irritate him, then into an absolutely charming come-on.
Have you worked with Tom Attenborough before?
Yes, he was assistant director on The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – the play I did for Jonathan Church [in 2013] which went into the West End and was nominated for a lot of awards. We worked together on that and we have a very close working relationship on this. Because it’s something I was passionate about doing there’s been a lot of research so we had to find a way, in a sense, of honouring the fact that I’m coming from here and I’m interested in going there but Jonathan would say to me ‘We also have to make sure we go there’. There’s a mutual respect and a trust, having an intelligent and sensitive outside eye to say ‘Even with what you want to do, you could serve it better this way’ and also ‘The piece might benefit if we heightened this or if we pulled the gas back a bit on that’. Because of the nature of the hugeness of the challenge for me, the relationship with the director is even more intense. You’ve got your intimate, private aspirations, but then you’ve got a shape and a context and a goal to serve which is not something you can monitor in the rehearsal room yourself.
How will you be spending your downtime in Bath? Are there things you like to do when you’re staying there?
Because of the tensions of the work I’ll definitely be using the newly refurbished baths to relax. There’s also some lovely walking and villages just outside of the city, which I like very much to visit and I have one or two friends who live not too far from Bath I’ll try and catch up with. I want to get out into the countryside while the summer is here because it will be gone all too soon.
Looking at Lucian receives its world premiere at the Ustinov Studio appearing until Saturday 2nd September.
