David Dawson in The Entertainer

Age:

Currently: Playing Archie Rice’s son Frank in the Old Vic’s 50th anniversary presentation of John Osborne’s elegy for a Britain in decline, The Entertainer. The production has drawn accolades for it’s contemporary resonance: the shadow of war hangs over it; political parties are considered indistinguishable from one another. “There’s so much about it that seems relevant now,” says Dawson. “The only thing that you could say is genuinely nostalgic about it is the music hall, really.”

Hometown: Widnes. “I knew I wanted to act ever since I was a baby,” he says. Dawson started going to a youth theatre when he was about eight years old. “Before I went to RADA, I toured the country in Therese Raquin,” he notes. “My teacher from the youth theatre went professional, so I joined her company and did that.”

Desperate Measures: Not contented solely with his burgeoning love of acting, Dawson discovered a precocious talent for writing that would later serve him well. “When I was about 17, I wrote a play, about a group of middle-aged women on holiday, called Divorced and Desperate. It was sort of based on people I knew around Widnes. I liked to just hang around and people watch and it came from there. I adore both acting and writing, but what I like about writing is that it’s like therapy. When you’re acting, the director’s in control. With writing, no one can tell you any differently. It’s all coming from your head.”

Pam Ferris and David Dawson in The Entertainer

A Pair of Windsors: Ambition inevitably led him south, and he duly observed the pre-fame prerequisite of many an aspiring thesp before him. “I was 18 when I first came to London”, he remembers. “I worked as a silver service waiter, and I got to serve Princess Anne and Posh and Becks! You weren’t allowed to talk to them and all that bollocks that goes with it. But that was quite fun. I wrote another play, called The Boy in the Bed, which was put on at the Tower Theatre in Islington. I got in touch with Barbara Windsor and Julie Walters, and they helped to fund it. At the same time, I auditioned for RADA, and I got in.”

Free Expression: “What I loved about RADA, and about what they stood for, is that they offer you lots of different techniques and styles of theatre, like Stanislavski and Method, but they don’t tell you specifically what to do. Instead, they say that’s it’s like having a theatrical suitcase, and you take out of it what will be useful to you personally in your career as an actor. That was great. And also the fact that the principal said to treasure your regionality—although I’ve yet to actually play a regional character, it’s all been RP so far! But I suppose that’s kind of good, really. It’s better than always playing to type."

To Play the King… Almost: From RADA, Dawson wasted no time whatsoever in moving up into the big league. “I got my first professional job at the Old Vic, in Richard II, through a wonderful casting director called Maggie Lunn, who came to see me at RADA in On The Razzle,” he says. “She brought me to meet Trevor Nunn, to read for Aumerle, and a week later they brought me back to read for Richard. I was kind of confused, because I knew Kevin Spacey was playing Richard. And then I found out I was going to understudy Spacey.” Was he apprehensive? Not a bit. “Because I was understudying, it felt like I had everything that was good about being in a major professional production without any of the pressure of actually having to go on. Of course, by the end I was absolutely biting at the bit to go on!”

Nunn the Wiser: His tenure under the esteemed director proved an edifying one. “The first week of rehearsals, Trevor sat the entire company down, and we didn’t even touch a script at all”, he says. “Instead, he did an uninterrupted history, with no notes, of classical theatre. It was quite overwhelming to see one man do that. But that brought us all right up to date and really gave us the context of Richard II. What was interesting was that there were lots of people of different ages in that company. People like Julian Glover and Peter Eyre, mixed up with people of my age. That was very exciting.”

Joan Plowright has kind words for David Dawson at the opening of The Entertainer

Understanding Osborne: Dawson’s role in The Entertainer provided him with a welcome introduction to John Osborne’s life and work. “I knew of him as the angry young man, but I hadn’t read his plays. My agent sent me the script of The Entertainer,and I immediately read the part of Frank and I loved the character. I’ve found Osborne writes with such depth, and I really like characters that have that much inner life. Frank’s 19, and I found out when I read Osborne’s biography that when Osborne was a teenager, especially at school, there were a lot of similarities—as there are between him and a lot of characters he writes, actually. For instance, he was bullied at school, and he was very shy.”

To Be Frank: “Although Frank loves music hall like his father, and he loves to sing and dance, he’s actually a very shy boy,” he says of his character. “As Osborne writes, he’s very pale and shy. Believe it or not, what I love about acting is that you’re playing other people, but in real life I’m actually quite shy myself, so that’s definitely something that Frank and I have in common.”

[AD]Let Us Entertain You: The young star has nothing but praise for his Entertainer cohorts. “It’s so exciting working on this play,” he smiles. “The five of us have grown very close now, which is really good. Robert [Lindsay] is such a lovely guy anyway; he’s so easy to work with. I’m happy for him that he’s getting such positive attention at the moment, for the Tony Blair things and for this. All the cast—especially Robert and Pam [Ferris], but all of them—work so organically, so the great thing is that every night it’s a very different show, it’s always very fresh. There’s nothing more exciting than working with actors who shake it up every night.”

Seal of Approval: Joan Plowright, who played alongside her husband Laurence Olivier in the play’s original run a half-century ago, bestowed the ultimate accolade on the present production with her support. “Me and Emma Cunniffe [who plays Frank’s sister Jean] did a warm-up on opening night, and we went for a walk”, Dawson says. “And we noticed that at a quarter past six, there was Lady Olivier. Sat in a box, ready to watch the show. It was quite an honour to have her there, really. It made it such an occasion to know that one of the original cast members from all those years ago, and Olivier’s wife, was actually in the audience. She came backstage after the show with tears in her eyes. To know that she was pleased with it, and to hope that Osborne would have been just as pleased with it, was something very special indeed.”