Jack Davenport

At 33, Jack Davenport has made a serious impression on film, TV and the stage, so it’s only natural to assume that his theatre resume is long and vast. In fact, the tall, lean actor—the sort of person for whom the word “dashing” was invented—is currently marking only his fourth-ever professional production with David Hare’s new version of the century-old Maxim Gorky play Enemies, which runs through 24 June at the Almeida Theatre. Davenport comes to the Almeida having nabbed a 2002 Olivier nomination for outstanding newcomer for his first play, The Servant, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, which was followed by Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan on the West End, starring Vanessa Redgrave and her real-life daughter Joely Richardson, and, rather unexpectedly, a solo stint playing the journalist Toby Young in Young’s own one-man show, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People at the Soho Theatre. In conversation, Davenport is anything but alienating, graciously reflecting on his upbringing as the son of noted thesps, who are now divorced. (His mum is actress Maria Aitken, his father actor Nigel Davenport). Himself married to actress Michelle Gomez, Davenport took time out during a tea break one afternoon during previews for Enemies to talk about a diverse career to date that includes a film-stealing eleventh-hour arrival as the charismatic, if doomed, Peter Kingsley-Smith in Anthony Minghella’s film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, playing a character not in the original novel, and his running gig as naval officer James Norrington in Pirates of the Caribbean, the Johnny Depp franchise that has so far spawned three films; in the romcom, The Wedding Date, he played the groom to Amy Adams’ bride. But in his native Britain, Davenport remains best-known for playing Miles across 32 hour-long episodes of the defining, hugely popular series This Life as well as his role as Steve in the half-hour comedy, Coupling, which regularly crops up on the inflight entertainment on various trans-Atlantic flights. Davenport’s own flights of enthusiasm this particular afternoon were largely given over to the task at hand: a meaty slab of the theatrical canon, in which Davenport plays the bibulous Yakov Bardin, younger brother to Sean Chapman’s factory boss, Zakhar Bardin, in a Russia poised on the cusp of change.

You’re deep into previews for Enemies at the moment, which is always a challenging time for any production.
Yes it is, inasmuch as you’re not just doing the show in the evenings but you’re working all day long, as well; I think we’re all slightly looking forward to having our days back. But what’s been great is to be working on a play which hasn’t been seen in London since the RSC about 35 years ago, and what distinguishes our version, obviously, is David [Hare’s] adaptation: I think for a lot of us Gorky plus Hare was the draw. He’s done an extraordinary job, really, not just linguistically but in terms of making the play a bit more accessible.

And in putting a lot of people on one stage.
There are 26 of us (20 speaking roles and six “extras”) and no bloody songs; that’s got to be a bonus in any language. The Almeida has never been so crowded.

Nor had such full dressing rooms.
(Laughs.) It is a bit hugger-mugger.

This play has been described as occupying the midpoint between Chekhov and the Russian Revolution. Is that a fair assessment?
It really is. I mean, poor old Gorky—it’s like Marlowe and Shakespeare: all these civilisations throw up great playwrights, and then there’s always the secondary guy. Gorky’s reputation outside Russia is far less than Chekhov’s, but the great thing Gorky does that Chekhov does less well has to do with giving a voice to all the classes. To paraphrase [the film] Withnail and I, Chekhov is a lot of people whining about ducks going to Moscow, [whereas] this is a much more sweeping portrait. The play was written at the time it is set, so it's a century old, and Gorky is predicting upheavals in Russian society that wouldn’t happen until 12 years later in 1917. He does that by giving voice to both the upper echelons and the very lowest, while, I think, all Chekhov ever manages are slightly emotionally dyslexic second lieutenants; that’s about as lower-class as Chekhov ever gets.

Where is Yakov in the play’s class line-up?
I’m afraid to say I'm nestling somewhere near the upper reaches of aristocratic alcoholic indolence. But what his self-indulgence has allowed him to do, as is often true of middle and upper-class characters, is to be at his most reflective in his own fog. Some people bottom out in certain ways, but others, like Yakov, achieve a strangely truth-telling quality; they kind of don't give a shit, so they can get at the heart of things at times.

More often than not, abetted by drink.
Yakov does imbibe fairly frequently. My vodka count means that in the course of the first two acts I should have got thru almost a whole bottle of brandy and perhaps one-third of a bottle of vodka. Luckily, a night passes between acts two and three, so I don't have to be wheeled out on a gurney with a small pipe going down my throat.

And, of course, you’ve never played the Almeida.
No, and I’ve always wanted to; it’s been a box I've wanted to tick. I've always liked the work they do here, and I love the theatre itself. One of the great advantages, too, is that there’s this thing about the commercial West End where a lot of hands are involved in bringing in great coachloads of people who don’t actually want to be there. But this place, like the Lyric Hammersmith, has a loyal core audience who come to see things. We’ve done three shows so far of what is a very political play, and from the moment it starts, the house is absolutely locked into it, listening, getting it; they’re focused on moments that require focus. The intimacy, too, is such a nice counterpart to the societal sweep that the play is about: it’s a nice balancing act for us to be playing this relatively great story—the sort of show you could absolutely do in the Olivier—in the Almeida: it’s as if we’ve just arrived from the chorus of Mary Poppins, and they’ve taken our tap shoes.

Quite a contrast to your solo stint as Toby Young.
I did that as a slightly suicidal challenge; I couldn’t believe I’d been asked to do it. I had terrible moments of doubt where I was thinking, what deadly combination of ego and hubris led me to think that, yes, me alone on stage would be more than sufficient to entertain an audience; it was the scariest thing I’d

Jack Davenport in How To Lose Friends and Alienate People

ever done. One of the things that appealed to me about this play now was that there are so many speaking parts: everybody gets a go. There is no main part, so it really is a true ensemble. What the play attempts to do is give you a snapshot of an entire society over the course of 24 hours, and whosever turn it is, as it were, is never just to move the plot on; everyone has something interesting or moving or emotional to say. Without that, there’s always the danger with so-called ensembles that, out of all the actors, maybe five have got lots to do and the other 15 are standing around going, “I could have done that much better.” Here, there’s absolutely none of that. I’m sure this sounds slightly masturbatory, but this is very much a collective, full of political and ideological ideas. (Pauses.) Ideological ideas? (Laughs.) You know what I mean.

No more one-man shows then?
I'm pleased I did it; it was a really big scary horrible challenge, [but] I'll never do another one-man show as long as I live, not least because to state the bleedin' obvious, the one thing nobody tells you is that it's incredibly lonely, not least because when you finish the show, if you haven't got a friend in, then you change out of your costumes, hand over your stinking shirt to wardrobe, and find yourself walking down the stairs with the people you've been bouncing around in front of for the previous hour: this is the weirdest way to earn a living I think I'd ever imagined. Even with a two-hander, you can have a drink with your fellow actor, but with this, there's no reflective surface; your other character is the audience.

Maybe Toby wanted you to play him in the play's long-mooted film version.
Christ, no! And in all honesty, I would be terrible casting. Toby had the amazing ineptitude of actually turning up with people he was clearly trying to seduce into playing the part in the film and then introducing me to them in the bar: the sort of thing only Toby could do. Anyway, to be fair, I'd be horrible casting in the film version, not just physically but temperamentally. It's up to others to decide whether I got away with it on stage anyway, though I'm told my breast-augmented Manhattanite is second to none.

So were you actively looking to come back to the theatre?
Oh yeah. I mean, these big blockbuster-y films are all well and good, but they’re terribly boring to make; you say one line of dialogue a fortnight if you’re lucky. When this came up—it’s a slightly labored visual metaphor—but I thought of it as one of those motorcycle display teams with people standing in pyramids, where everyone has to knock it out of the park. That’s very exciting, I have to say.

Just as it must have been exciting to be nominated for an Olivier your first time out at bat.
To be perfectly honest with you, I was incredibly and embarrassingly pleased with myself to have managed to get a nomination for an Olivier. There are far too

Jack Davenport & Amanda Drew in Enemies

many acting awards given out every year, but then when I arrived at the ceremony, it was full of actors you just think are wonderful. When you're at the TV Quick Awards, it’s a slightly less inspiring ensemble. The thing is, I was very chuffed to be nominated in any way, shape, or form, though I do remember thinking that [fellow nominee] Ralf Little and I should not have been in that category, since we weren’t exactly “new.”’ As it is, the award was won by someone [Benjamin Davies for Fucking Games] who had just left drama school. If either Ralf or I had won, it would have been a slight travesty in terms of what that category is about.

It was John Gielgud, I believe, who liked to speak of being "theatrically englamoured" by his family. Was that much the same with you, growing up with two noted actors (Maria Aitken and Nigel Davenport) for parents?
Well, you know, tragically, it is true that I did spend a lot of my youth doing my homework and falling asleep in dressing rooms and then being carried into the car after the show. I'm very accustomed to this environment; it's one I do really, really love.

But you haven't chosen to work with your parents in the way that, say, the Redgraves and the Cusacks have notably done.
We talked about it years ago in a slightly joky way, but I think we're all a bit reluctant. Often it does smack of slightly stunty casting: shouldn't some relationships remain sacred? I don't feel the need to necessarily parade my own life in front of others any more than I have to already. My wife and I have talked about doing stuff together occasionally but have pulled up short, I don't know; it's that there's your working life and your private life. My mum and I used to say that we'd do a season that included The Vortex, Ghosts and Hamlet: that would kill off our relationship for good. And I'm not sure if would look very good if she reprised her role in The Vortex opposite me when Rupert Everett was pretty nearly definitive.

But you seem to have renewed your affection for the theatre.
After having been doing the sorts of movies I've been doing the last few years, this is the one performance medium that is an actor's medium: the one place where we're kind of in control of what we're doing. That taps into the slightly Catholic self-improvement-y side of me, in that theatre is the only place where you learn to take proper risks and to indeed get better. With movies what you're being asked to do is to plot your way from point A to point Z with as little fuss and as quickly, therefore as cheaply, as possible so they can move on and get the next bit and another gazillion dollars.

And TV?
That is the middle ground: character development in a sitcom is a fairly rare occurrence; sitcom characters are usually defined by the fact that they never learn from their mistakes. One of the great appeals of a sitcom is how quick it is but it's still a strange one, a halfway house bet theatre and telly: there's no other TV medium with both a load of cameras and a live audience. It's fairly bizarre.

And yet, Coupling and This Life must have brought you what all actors crave—namely, choice.
Thank God for that, though I have no more choice than most actors, which is basically not much at all. It's important to think carefully; I mean, it's not like I'm drowning in a sea of scripts. I'm like most British actors who've been around a while: I sort of take what I'm offered.

Which brings us to Pirates of the Caribbean and its two sequels: do you have much left to shoot?
A little bit, thankfully, only a small amount. Norrington, happily for me, does change quite a lot, but I can't tell you how or I'd have to kill you—or Mr. Bruckheimer [the films' producer Jerry Bruckheimer] would not be happy.