Chris New

Age: 25

Currently: Making his professional stage debut in Martin Sherman’s Bent, less than three months after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He is playing the lead role of Horst, who is imprisoned in a concentration camp for being gay and falls in love with fellow prisoner Max (Alan Cumming). The roles were respectively originated by Tom Bell and Ian McKellen in 1979 and in a different production the same year on Broadway by David Dukes and Richard Gere. New did not see that original London production. “I wasn’t even conceived yet,” he exclaims. (He was born in 1981). McKellen reprised his role in 1990, with Michael Cashman (the one-time EastEnders actor now turned MEP) as Horst at the National Theatre, but Chris was still too young to see it. He ran into Cashman a few weeks before this production opened. “I was having supper with Martin, and Michael just came up to the table. It was weird—Martin had two Horsts in front of him.” But even without seeing Bent on stage New was aware of the groundbreaking work. “It was always kind of in the consciousness around me in the theatre world,” he explains.

Hometown: Originally from Swindon, New moved to London when he was 18. “I started exploring the world,” he recalls. “I dabbled in writing a bit, but not much.” New and friend Rupert Proctor received a commission to write Doing Really Well, a three-minute film for a slot after the Channel 4 news. He also wrote a play called Shed, produced by the Pleasance Theatre and the Mardi Gras Arts Festival. He admits that he lso had a “few lost teenage years.” It all seemed to work to his advantage. “I think that when I came to London for the first time I was very much interested in seeing a very different world to Swindon and enjoying myself and meeting new people, so the career was slightly on the back foot, which was actually a good thing later. When I went to RADA, I could concentrate much more on the work.”

Chris New in Bent

Riding into RADA: Before entering RADA, New went to Bristol Old Vic theatre school first, but he left after a term and took a year off to question “whether it was the school that was the problem or me, and whether I had the right idea about what my career would be,” he says. After the time off, New decided to reapply to drama schools but discovered that all of them—bar RADA—had closed their application rounds already. “I’d never auditioned for them before,” he says. “I thought they’d never take a common boy from Swindon, but I thought I’d get back into it and warm up with a RADA audition before doing all the top schools the next year. But I got into RADA that year; it was very lucky.”

Discovering Drama: How did he find his vocation? “I have no idea!” he laughs. “A lot of people tell stories of going to see a certain play, but I can’t remember a decision point. It was just always what I was going to do.” School, of course, played a crucial part. “I had two really good drama teachers, one at my secondary school, Mr. Sanderson, and the other at the college where I did my A levels, Christopher Scott, who ran the course like a rep theatre. We did 30 plays a year with him. We churned through it, and that’s when I was first introduced to playwrights like Beckett. Performing Krapp’s Last Tape at 15 was a bit silly thinking about it now, but we did it and Woyzeck and stuff I’d never heard of.”

Chrsi New & Alan Cumming in Bent

Paying His Dues: Coming to London meant finding a new kind of freedom, but he also had to earn a living. What did he do? “Oh, everything,” he says. “I was a waiter, I worked in various bars, in an art gallery. And I even worked for this company that were contractors to the police department, who would phone up and say that they had a crime scene that needed cleaning up, so I’m on the end of the phone taking down the details: ‘We’ve got blood, vomit.’ It was gruesome. I didn’t stay long.” He also used to busk outside Shakespeare’s Globe. “I used to do the famous soliloquies. It was great fun, but my rule was never to do stuff from shows that were on there. [Former Globe Artistic Director] Mark Rylance came out once and sat there in his pork-pie hat, smoking a cigarette, and when I finished the speech, he came up and put some money in my hat. I told him I was about to go to RADA [which Rylance also attended], and he said that when I finished, I should write to him and come and work there. But he left last year, before I [finished]. I did tell Dominic Dromgoole [the Globe’s new artistic director] and asked if that offer transfers, but I don’t think he was impressed.”

Getting Bent: How did New get involved with Bent? “Daniel Kramer [the director] came to see a show I was doing at RADA called Balm in Gilead, directed by Che Walker, a friend of his, so he got me to audition for the part of Rudy [a smaller role], but I didn’t get it. They were having trouble casting it, so a couple of weeks later, I was called back in to talk about it again, and had two more meetings about Rudy, but I still didn’t get it. And then the person they’d offered the role of Horst to took another job, so they were without a Horst. And both Daniel and Martin had apparently said when they met me what a pity it was that they hadn’t met me for Horst, so I went back and had another two meetings with them about it. And then I waited a month, before I got a call saying that Sonia Friedman [the show’s producer] would like to meet me, so I had to do yet another audition—my sixth—and was finally offered it!”

Chris New in Bent

Sheltered: How did it feel when he was told he had the job? “I was doing that thing where you walk around with a huge grin,” he exclaims. “It was just weird.” Was he daunted by the prospect of making his debut in such a high-profile project? “It hasn’t been too shell-shocking because of the way Martin and Daniel and Alan have all looked after me. They’ve guided me through it.”

Bent Challenges: “It’s not Oscar Wilde,” New says of the show. Indeed. In additional to the emotional trials of the part, there’s a huge physical job, too. Every night he and Cumming move several heavy rocks from one side of the stage to the other, and they’re for real. “I’ve got very good muscles now,” New laughs. “The second act is literally nonstop rock moving.” It’s also getting quite a reaction in previews. “We’re getting some very strange reactions to some of the events in the play. There’s one scene where people have to leave, not because they’re hating it but because they’re overwhelmed. One girl had to be taken out by her boyfriend because she was in floods of tears and couldn’t stop. And at the end of the show, I always listen out for the sobs.” Do the actors take these reactions offstage with them? “When we first started running the play, Alan and I would be really tender afterwards and couldn’t really talk about it,” he says. “If we went near it, we’d get upset again. Now that we’ve run it so many times, it’s starting to have less of an effect, and we know how to deal with it. Now we can go to our dressing rooms and have a laugh.”