Dugald Bruce-Lockhart

Age: 40. “That’s very young,” he laughs. “It’s the new 21.”

Hometown: Hard to say, as befits someone whose parents worked in the Foreign Office. Bruce-Lockhart was born in Fiji, grew up and went to school in Cyprus, and then followed as his parents moved between Austria, Nigeria and Germany at different times. “I was brought up catching lizards and keeping strange pets outside; I never thought I’d be dealing with internal emotions.” Home at the moment is Willesden Junction, northwest London, though, he says, deadpan, "I have my favorite hoodie that I can pretty well sleep in anywhere."

Currently: Playing Freddie Page, the onetime RAF pilot who is both the source of erotic bliss and much misery to Greta Scacchi’s Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea, the Terence Rattigan play now in revival at the Vaudeville Theatre. The production is directed by Edward Hall, for whom Bruce-Lockhart shone last year as Petruchio in an unusually vivid and venal all-male touring production of The Taming of the Shrew. That show ran in repertory with Twelfth Night, where the six-foot-tall actor played Olivia. His co-star there was Tam Williams, son of his Deep Blue Sea co-star, Simon Williams.

Dugald Bruce-Lockhart and Greta Scacci in The Deep Blue Sea

It’s Raining Men: Bruce-Lockhart has worked more often with Hall than any other director, including the current go-round, which, he says, marks their sixth or seventh show collaboration. This is their first show that hasn’t been part of Hall’s testosterone-charged Propeller troupe: “It’s great to come and work with real girls; that’s always a good thing.” Among those “girls” is leading lady Scacchi, the film star (White Mischief, The Player, Heat and Dust) for whom Bruce-Lockhart has only praise. “A lot of people will remember Greta from those films, [but] she’s so clearly an amazing actress for this part. We’ve had really good press and she’s very pleased, too, because it’s fantastic for her. I’m amazed how she does it because emotionally the play’s so intense.” How has he taken to playing women in some of his Shakespearean gigs? “I’m sort of quite a big, stocky bloke, so playing Olivia in high-heel boots and a sequinned dress was a lot of fun. Afterwards in the bar, my hands would be fluttering all over the place; it would take me a couple of beers before I found myself again.” He laughs. “I think I prefer playing men, to be fair.”

Dugald Bruce-Lockhart in Twelfth Night

Cruelty Quotient: For so amiable and freely spoken a chap, Bruce-Lockhart has played his share of notably cruel men, not least Deep Blue Sea’s Freddie, whose way of dealing with the lovesick, suicidal Hester is to remark, “My god, aren’t women the end?” The actor, a 1994 RADA graduate of the same vintage as TV stars Andrew Lincoln (This Life) and Stephen Mangan (Green Wing), places such behavior in perspective: “It’s a cruelty that actually comes from a frustration with oneself. We’ve all been in relationships that worked or haven’t worked, and at the very last minute, like a lot of people who’ve had a relationship, they think they don’t want to be there but the moment the other person says, ‘I’m better off without you,’ Freddie suddenly realizes his need for Hester and the gaping chasm that he has left.” Bruce-Lockhart points with some pride to reactions he got during this production’s 10-week tour, prior to its West End transfer. “I’d get a lot of comments afterwards, especially from the older generation, who would say that they knew lots of people like that but that what they also see is the humanity. As long as you’re playing the intentions that are written, you can’t go wrong.”

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Starting Over: Bruce-Lockhart says it helped with Deep Blue Sea that neither he nor his director had ever previously seen the play, so they could approach it as if it were new. “Ed was very keen that this wasn’t going to be a period piece. Obviously, it’s set at the time [1952], and there are reasons for that, but it’s so much about human nature and frustration and the love triangle. When you read it on the page, it can seem very stand-offish because everyone tries to communicate but not quite. What we’ve done is blow the dust off the covers and see what’s actually going on underneath: there’s no point in doing theater for a museum piece’s sake.”