Desmond Barrit
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Desmond Barrit—born 63 years ago as Desmond Brown—is one of the most versatile and talented of British stage performers. He is an artist who can turn his hand from Dick Cheney in
Stuff Happens to Pseudolus in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to Eddie Carbone in
A View From the Bridge to Bottom in
A Midsummer Night's Dream. That last in an Adrian Noble production that transferred to Broadway and was made into a film. He's currently reprising the role of Hector in Alan Bennett's
The History Boys, which Barrit played at the National Theatre, on tour, and even briefly on Broadway, filling in for two weeks at the Broadhurst Theatre while Tony winner Richard Griffiths, who originated the part, was away fulfilling his
Harry Potter screen chores. Barrit is now back in the part of the beloved prof who has something of a penchant for groping his male students in the play's encore West End gig, once again at Wyndham's Theatre. That's where the actor took time prior to a recent Monday evening show to discuss a brilliant career that didn't even begin until he was in his 30s.
Congratulations on being back in a role on which you have left your own indelible mark.
Thank you! Yes, the play's been around for three and a half years, and I've sort of been associated with it at different times for two and a half years. It's funny, when I do a play, I always keep the script in my dressing room, and in the interval of our last performance at the National, I thought, I'll keep this; it's special. And then the better part of nine months passed and I was at home and came across the script and thought, should I throw it? No, I won't. And then I got a call from Nick [Hytner, the director], asking would I go and take over from Richard [Griffiths] in America, which of course I did. And when I finished there, I still didn't throw the script away—which is good because we toured again for three months and we've now been here at Wyndham's since mid-December, though they do keep telling us this is supposed to be the last time.
To what do you attribute this play's particular success? Is it that school is one thing we all have in common?
Yeah, well, I don't know: I think essentially we all associate with something in the play. People keep on coming up to me after performances and saying I'm a teacher, I taught, and we all remember our schooldays or that period, and the memories are generally kind. Although some elements in this play are slightly suspect or risqué, perhaps, the memory of one's childhood is always a pleasant memory; it always gets better with time. So Alan's play brings back those days of being at school and having fun and having an inspirational teacher, as I certainly did.
Desmoind Barrit in The History Boys
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Who was yours?
His name was Vincent Brown, and he was no relation to me at all, even though my name of course was Brown before I changed it to Barrit. He was our arts tutor at a grammar school in south Wales that was essentially a science school and where nonetheless he persuaded them to stage a production of Hamlet in which I go t the part of Hamlet, age 14, and his wife made all the costumes. He never taught me to draw, because I think that's a bit like acting; you either do it or you can't do it. But he did teach me how to appreciate art and to be excited by everything to do with painting: in fact I can still picture him now, and I still remember him dearly.
You mention the risqué, perhaps even morally dubious aspects of the play, with Hector's penchant for groping his students on motorcycle rides. And yet he still wins the audience's sympathy.
I think the majority of the people that come to see the play are on Hector's side, not the headmaster's. And most of the eight boys apart from Posner perhaps experience these little rides home on the back of a motorbike, and they all think it's hysterically funny: there's not one who is having a wrecked life as a result. The boys send it up, and so it's not harmful.
Besides, it's not for you to judge the character but to play the role.
As an actor, you perform the play, you don't give an opinion. You leave the audience to decide, and the audience does side with Hector. What Hector gives the boys is this fantastic ability to go into the wide world and be a part of humanity, which far outweighs this little bit of groping. It's not sex; it's a rite of passage, whereas obviously Hector immediately recognises something in Posner that keeps him away from that one student. He is the real McCoy [in terms of being on his way to becoming a gay man] whereas these other boys aren't.
You had an extraordinary entry into the acting profession, didn't you?
I came into acting as a bet, as you probably know. Someone six months younger than me was going to drama school, and I was with all her younger student friends at a party and in my drunken haze said, ‘Anybody can act,' so a friend of mine said, ‘You can 't get a job as an actor,' and I said, ‘I bet I can,' and I got a job with a children' s theater company based in Cardiff run by a woman named Violet Philpotts, who was as eccentric as the name sounds. That was the beginning of my acting career: on Friday, I was an accountant; by Sunday, I was an actor.
Mind you, I would imagine having an accounting background would be exceedingly useful to your current profession.
[Laughs.] I can tell when they're fiddling us. I say, ‘Let me have a look at the books,' and that puts the fear of God into them.
Still, it's amazing, because your story illustrates the degree of luck—coupled of course with talent—that goes with being an actor at any time in one's life.
You've just said the thing that I think is terribly important as an actor, which is luck. When people say to me, ‘What do you need?' I say, ‘Luck is the first thing, a bit of talent is the second thing, and an ability to get on with people is the third thing.' I was lucky enough to meet Nick Hytner; that was my luck—we did The Scarlet Pimpernel, which came into Her Majesty's from Chichester, in which I played someone with a hump on my back and my right eye in the middle of my cheek: a slightly uglier elephant man.
Probably the most bizarre thing Nick has yet asked you to do is to play Dick Cheney for him in the David Hare play, Stuff Happens.
That was very interesting because we couldn't actually find much footage of Dick Cheney. We saw some photographs, of course, and I saw that one side of his top lip was fuller than the other side, so I adopted that little thing. But what's great about Nick is that he's very succinct with his notes. He said to me as far as Dick Cheney, ‘With him, every time someone asks you a question, you think to yourself, Oh fuck off, and then answer it.' [Laughs.] And it worked. That's the noisiest show I've ever done from an audience point of view; sometimes you'd hear people shouting things out.
What's next for you after Hector?
I'm actually going into Wicked, to play the Wizard of Oz; I'm due to start rehearsals May 12 and then go into two or three weeks later. [His predecessor] Nigel Planer has been it for a year and a half; he's a fixture and a fitting now. But they have to make a new costume for me because I'm slightly larger.