Janet McTeer
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Janet McTeer is the actress-as-firebrand, a notably husky-voiced, sensual stage presence who electrified London and New York over a decade ago as Nora in
A Doll's House (winning both an Olivier and a Tony for Best Actress), from which she segued to an Oscar nomination for her itinerant mother in
Tumbleweeds, bringing the 47-year-old theater animal to her widest movie audience to date. Since that time, she's returned to the London boards, most memorably as Mary to Harriet Walter's Elizabeth I in
Mary Stuart, which she expects to repeat on Broadway in January 2009. In the meantime, she' s back in the West End for the first time since
Mary Stuart transferred from the Donmar to the Apollo, as one of the starry quartet heading the Gielgud Theatre company of
God of Carnage, the latest from Yasmina Reza, the Paris-based Tony-winning author of
Art. Translated as per usual by Christopher Hampton, the play casts McTeer in a role played in Paris by Isabelle Huppert: the pro-moderation, socially conscious Veronique, wife to Ken Stott's Michel and mother of an (unseen) son who has had two of his teeth knocked out in a playground scuffle with the child of Alain (Ralph Fiennes) and Annette (Tamsin Greig). McTeer took time prior to a Wednesday matinee to talk to Broadway.com about playing a contemporary role for a change, acting the part of a mother when you aren't one yourself, and her excitement about returning to the New York stage early next year.
It's wonderful, Janet, to see you in modern dress, not the period garb that has defined so many of your stage roles to date.
Yeah, it's really good fun, and very strange going and doing something wearing a short skirt; I think people must have thought for a while that I didn't really have legs.
Was this job a no-brainer?
More or less. It's such a good play. I had worked with Matthew [director Matthew Warchus] before when we did Much Ado and he just called me up and offered it. I think Ralph was already doing it at that point, and Tamsin might have been doing it. But, you know, they're quite hard to read, Yasmina's plays: when you read them, they don't read as staggeringly funny. You read them, and there are quite a few funny bits and the rest of it is quite bleak. But having seen Art and knowing her style, when I did read [God of Carnage], I did think, this is really dark and really weird, and that appeals. And when we were rehearsing it, that much became clear. It would be as if you and I were in a cafe having a chat about dogs, or whatever, and then the people at the next table start having a furious fight about who left the milk out: From our point of view, it's terribly funny but from their point of view, it's terribly tragic. So when that person starts to cry, you suddenly feel guilty for having laughed at them, and it's all very moving.
Well, it's interesting the extent to which Yasmina herself seems to dismiss the very notion of her plays as comedies—sometimes vehemently so. She thinks she's written tragedies that are funny, which is not the same thing as writing a comedy that inherently isn't supposed to challenge you and is not supposed to be dark; I think in the end it's just phraseology. It's like Ayckbourn, who gets his dark messages about suburbia across in a comedy. I think, too, that it's about not wanting to feel like you've written something that isn't about anything. You play it as if it's totally straight while acknowledging the fact that it's a comedy, somehow.
What's fascinating is the way one's perspective keeps shifting on the four characters across the play's 100 minutes.
Yes, I think we should want to be all of the characters at one moment or another in the play, and I'd like to think that if someone beat up my kid, that I'd do what Veronique does—although of course everyone ends up disagreeing with her, which makes her pompous and insufferable and self-righteous so you come out saying, "I don't like her at all." There's Alain whom you loathe from the word go and enjoy loathing because he's so repellent. But actually, he's the only one who's stuck to his guns: there's no side, no softness there; he's a total 100% cynic, so you end up thinking, "I don't much like you either." I've had people coming to my dressing room who go, "They're all awful," or other people who go, "God, I feel sorry for all of them." There's Tamsin's character, Annette, who works her socks off and has this control freak husband: who wouldn't throw up and get drunk in her circumstances? And then there's Ken [Stott's] character, Michel, who you just think has to put up with this totally PC wife and this PC way of thinking, and he just can't fucking do it in the end. His thinking is that at the end of the day, boys will be boys, so just shut up about it.
In some ways, it seems to me, your character, Veronique, goes through the most substantial journey in the play.
I suppose you could say that she shows her real colors by becoming violent. After all, when Alain says, "you know, her integrity has to be acknowledged," that's totally and utterly true. She's 100% committed to learning how to be civilized, whether in Africa, since she's written a book about Darfur, or next door. It's only when everyone turns out to be against her that she loses her rag, and it's just interesting to me that she's not allowed to do that, as well. Obviously, this particular argument happens to come on the cusp of a really dodgy time in her relationship.
Ralph Fiennes and Janet McTeer
in God of Carnage
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Veronique also gets pretty much the play's only appeal for moderation.
She's somebody who loses her hope. She's thinking, We really are trying to be moderate, to sort this out like adults, to make sure they learn the right lesson, and then when she realizes none of the adults are interested, including her own husband, she thinks, I don't know why I fucking bother: I organized this and it hasn't worked, and now I look stupid, totally undermined.
Interestingly, she's also the only character we see in the process of parenting—in that final phone call built around a lie.
I remember when I first read the play, I thought, that's a really strange ending, but when you do it, you think, it's absolutely perfect. The whole premise is the child, these fights, and then the play becomes about these adults falling apart, so that by the time we've forgotten what the play's about, we're reminded in the last second: Given the fact that it's all been quite stupid and funny as well as quite moving and quite extreme, at the end of the day there's that child.
Does it matter in acting this play whether one has children?
I don't have kids and I don't think that matters one iota, to be honest. Once you get to my grand old age, you've got millions of children in your life, even if they're not yours, and they come and talk to you and stay. My nephew comes and turns up whenever he can't cope with his mother, and another one of my best friend's children does exactly the same: you sort of sit there and discuss the meaning of life.
Are we ever going to get your last West End play, Mary Stuart, in New York?
It was going to be this September, but everyone tells us that's not a great time to do that particular play, so now it looks as if it will be January '09; we're just trying to coordinate dates. Two things held us up, really: one was that Harriet was doing Cleopatra [opposite Patrick Stewart's Antony] and then last year Phyllida [director Phyllida Lloyd] was doing the movie of Mamma Mia!, which she just finished editing; I saw it the other day.
Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer
in Mary Stuart
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When you were first considering Mary Stuart, how did you know which of those two great female adversaries you most wanted to play?
Well, when we were first thinking of doing the play, Phyl and I said I didn't know which one I wanted to play, and to be totally honest, I thought, in 10 years' time I can play Elizabeth but in 10 years' time I'll be too old to play Mary. The fact is, Harriet's been so great that I don't think now that I could ever play her. It did occur to Harriet and me to swap roles, but people aren't prepared to pay you that much money.
It's astonishing that you haven' t returned to the New York theater since Doll's House.
It is amazing, actually; I nearly did a few times: Jeremy Irons and I were going to do Private Lives and I don't quite know what happened with that. But hopefully Mary Stuart will do it.
Ken Stott, Ralph Fiennes and Janet McTeer
in God of Carnage
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What about God of Carnage there?
If we were going to do that in America, I have a suspicion that they'd want to do it before we were all free.
Speaking of which, you get to deliver and serve up a pretty amazing-looking clafoutis early on in the play: why don't the producers sell some in the lobby on the way out?
[Laughs.] We should have had that on opening night. We've auditioned so many clafoutis; you have no idea how complicated it is if you have to eat and act, particularly because we've got to eat it eight times a week—Ralph, especially, who has to have four slices and would be the size of a house by the time we got to June if this were a real clafoutis.
So what is it then?
This one is an omelette made every performance by the stage manager. Isn't that odd? [Laughs] What we're actually eating bears no reference to a clafoutis.