Michael Cumpsty

Theater fans know that when Michael Cumpsty's name is in the cast list, they can expect a thoughtful, beautifully delivered performance. Now entering his 20th year on the New York stage, Cumpsty is a pro—and he's got the resume to prove it, from Broadway plays The Constant Wife, Democracy, Copenhagen, Enchanted April, Electra, The Heiress and musicals revivals of 42nd Street and 1776 to a long list of Shakespeare productions, culminating in his well-reviewed Hamlet last fall at Classic Stage Company. Now he's back at CSC in the title role of Richard II, again directed by the company's artistic director, Brian Kulick. Cumpsty recently shared some of his vast knowledge of the Bard with Broadway.com and chatted about the winding road that took him from Wakefield, England, to Capetown, South Africa, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and finally to New York.

Why did you and director Brian Kulick choose to do Richard II, a play that most theatergoers don't know well?
Well, that's a funny thing—in Britain, it's considered one of the greatest hits. The language is among the most beautiful of all the plays Shakespeare wrote, and the character himself is one of the most self-consciously poetic. He's somebody who is very immature and spoiled and entitled, somebody who's been told he is at the center of the universe and is happy to believe it. He has to grow up and realize that he's not, which is something we all have to do. Even though none of us is a king who is being deposed, we all have to experience an opening of eyes to the world—becoming more compassionate and more aware of other people's needs—as we grow up. I think it's one of the most profoundly universal and human of all the plays.

This is your third Shakespeare production with Brian [after Timon of Athens in Central Park in 1996 and Hamlet at CSC last fall]. Why do you enjoy working together?
He's very generous about surrendering a certain amount of control so that it becomes a true collaboration. I have a tendency to be a micromanager as far as the text is concerned; I deal with the text on a phrase by phrase basis. Brian reads widely and deeply around the material and conceptualizes thematically. He'll come up with a big idea, and I say, "That needs to be tied specifically to this moment in the text." And then I'll badger him about some moment in the text, and he says, "Let's think about the bigger picture for a minute and then come back to the specifics." So we sort of meet in the middle. It's fun.

I read that you were doing something with Richard II at NYU.
Yes, I directed a production of it with first-year students in the NYU grad program in late spring.

That must have opened a lot of windows in your mind about it.
Absolutely. After I finished rehearsing it with them, I found it quite easy to learn. By the time we started rehearsal [at CSC] I was well and truly steeped in the play.

Are you doing more teaching and directing now?
I've taught in the Shakespeare Lab Training Program at the Public Theater for about seven of the last 10 summers, and I do some coaching during the year. Brian and I are talking about my directing something at CSC next year. I have never had a particular desire to direct, but I discovered when I did it this year that I really enjoyed it.

What's the key to acting Shakespeare well?
Actually, there isn't a great deal that you need to know. You can learn a few fundamental principles over the course of a couple of weeks, and then it's just a process of becoming comfortable doing it so you're not self-conscious. It's about making the language active, which is what all acting is about. You have to decide what you're saying, why you're saying it, what you want and why you're not immediately able to get it. If you play those things to the hilt while acknowledging the technical requirements of the language, which are not that hard to assimilate, then that should be pretty good Shakespeare.

What did you love most about playing Hamlet?
It was a heck of a ride—it was kind of like luging. By the time we put the production together, we just got on it and went. Brian and I made a deliberate decision to move away from the 19th-century romantic tradition of Hamlet being a super-sensitive, super-refined soul who is caught in this terrible situation that he doesn't quite manage to deal with. We wanted to take him more toward what I think the roots of the play are, which is a revenging hero. It's a revenger's tragedy to some extent. And he's not a nice person—he does really awful things, and he's awful to people he has no right to be awful to, particularly Ophelia and Ophelia's brother, Laertes. We wanted him to be kind of brutal, not overly nice, and so I didn't particularly invest in the poetry. I wanted to go for the action of the character and for the connectedness between the character and the audience, which made it a wild ride.

Did you have qualms about tackling Hamlet at age 45? Kevin Kline was over 40 the last time he did it.
No, I didn't. I do think it would be interesting to see a really young Hamlet, as long as the language is fully under control and you don't lose anything as a result of him being young. But he's not as young as many people erroneously think he is. There's a fairly common perception that he's a teenager, and he's not, by any means. The text suggests that he's at least 30. The idea of his being a student is more what we would think of as a scholar. He's somebody who's moved away from his responsibilities to go off and be in an ivory tower.

One thing that makes him seem young is his relationship with Ophelia. If he's older, why hasn't he married her already?
There's no clear indication of how long that relationship's been going on. She's not generally known in the court to be his girlfriend, so I think you have to assume that it's only been going on since he came home after his father's death, which is a couple of months. It's not a relationship that's been going on since they were kids.

It must feel satisfying to have climbed that particular Shakespearean mountain. You'll never have to say, "Gee, I wish I had done Hamlet..."
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny—that's another thing I never particularly had a burning desire to do. Brian had said to me several times, "Do you want to do Hamlet?" And I thought, "I don't really." People tend to be intimidated by it, but I'm glad I did it. It was a major experience in my life.

Do you enjoy performing Shakespeare in CSC's intimate theater?
I love it. With Hamlet, we had this whole debate before we started about whether the soliloquies would be me just talking to myself or whether they would be direct address to the audience. At first I wanted to keep them to myself, and then I decided to try the direct address and really liked it. That level of connectedness to the people who are sitting there watching the event is stimulating on both sides.

What's the greatest Shakespearean performance you've ever seen?
Oh well… [long pause] There are a couple I've seen on film that I really admire. There's a 1976 production of the Scottish play [Macbeth] that Trevor Nunn directed at the RSC with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. Both are very good, but for my money, Judi Dench as Lady M is just astonishing. Fiona Shaw played Richard II in a production I saw on tape, and she's remarkably good. On stage, I saw Derek Jacobi play Prospero in The Tempest a couple of years ago, and I thought he was extremely good.

I notice that you're not naming any American productions.
Well, ummm…

How about the ones you've been in?
I'll tell you my favorite performance in all the plays I've been in: Diane Venora's Hermione in The Winter's Tale, directed by James Lapine years and years ago [1989] at the Public Theater with Mandy Patinkin. She was fantastic. She's one of my favorite actresses. A great, great, great Shakespeare performance is Diane playing Ophelia in the Hamlet that we did with Kevin. [Cumpsty played Laertes in Kline's 1990 production.]

Your resume includes Democracy, Copenhagen, Racing Demon, Electra and gobs of Shakespeare, so I have to ask: Why do you end up doing all these talky plays?
Because I love text. I just love having language to deal with. I would prefer having a chunk of stuff to say than to stand around looking interesting in the corner of a shop.

You've also done your share of villains. It must be your voice.
Yeah, and my look, too. I think I just tend to look villainous. I used to play a lot of naïve kids when I was younger and then as I got older I started playing these morally ambiguous characters who can go either way; either you assume they're wicked and they turn out not to be, or you hope the audience will accept that they're not wicked and they do turn out to be.

But then every so often you surprise us with Enchanted April or The Constant Wife or 42nd Street.
I love doing that goofy, silly comedy stuff, I have to say. I'd like to do more of it.

What's harder: a leading Shakespearean role or going on stage and singing in 42nd Street?
Well, for me, probably 42nd Street, because I'm not a singer. I was constantly intimidated by that experience, and at a couple of performances I just fell flat on my face when I sang my songs in a key completely other than the key the orchestra was playing in. [laughs] Before I did 1776 I had never tried to sing; I'm not a natural singer at all, but I have been pursuing it ever since. I go to a singing lesson every week and I try to sing and work on my voice for an hour every day.

Let's back up a bit. You were born in England and raised in South Africa. How on earth did you end up at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?
I moved with my family to South Africa when I was nine years old and was still there when I graduated high school. There was a two-year compulsory service in the military, which I didn't want to do because it would have meant fighting for the South African regime, so I went to school in England for a couple of years and then applied for this hugely endowed scholarship to the University of North Carolina. It was a great opportunity, and it solved my immediate problem of not wanting to go back to South Africa. I came to the States thinking it would be temporary and ended up staying.

Is it true you were thinking of going to medical school?
I had a place in medical school in South Africa. It starts there right after high school, doing premed and then med school, so it's seven years. I came to the States intending to go back but I kept deferring it and started doing a lot of theater extracurriculars. One thing led to another.

Did Chapel Hill seem like another planet to you?
In some ways. My father went to business school at what was then Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and my sister was born in the States, so things American were part of the family lore. I was very keen to come over because I had heard so many stories. There was a kind of outdoorsiness to the south. In some ways, it's more European than the northern states in terms of etiquette, civility and those things. So it wasn't as foreign as it might have been.

I still hear a bit of South Africa in your voice.
Well, mostly it's a mess, because I started out British, then I had seven years of South African, then I had British public school for two years, then I had North Carolina for eight years, and I've been in New York since 1986. It's what one voice teacher once described as a "phonetic disaster." [laughs]

At this point, do you consider New York home?
I don't have a home in a deep way, and I've made my peace with that. I went through a period a few years ago where that freaked me out a little bit; I got quite depressed about it. When I came back from a period of working in England I felt confused, because a lot of my family is still in South Africa so my sense of home is very fragmented. There isn't a home community in England, and I've been in the States since I was 19. When I came back from that trip, I decided the time had come to become an American citizen. It was also a couple of years after 9/11, which had made me feel that I wanted to take that step. Becoming a citizen had a really interesting, deep resonance for me and actually made New York feel more like home.

You're one of the rare actors who has really created a life in the theater. Do you tell your NYU students that it's still possible to do that? A lot of young actors think, "I have to run to L.A."
Well, the thing is, it's possible, but in all honesty, it's really, really hard. I don't mean that I had to work really hard to achieve it—in some ways, I feel I achieved it by accident or just good timing. But statistically speaking, it's hard to make a life in the theater. There are a handful of actors who work in the New York theater as frequently as I do. For the rest, it's incredibly hard to get work, and if you do get work, it's incredibly hard to support yourself. I've been fortunate in getting so much commercial theater work, which has paid bills and allowed me to put some money away, so when it comes time to do something at a theater like Classic Stage Company that can only afford to play a subsistence wage, I can. If you're not lucky enough to have found a niche in the commercial theater, you have to do something else: film, TV, voiceovers, teaching or whatever.

You've dipped your toe in the TV waters in various ways. Would you want to do more of that?
I loved being on L.A. Law. It was a really good show, but by the time I joined that company, there were 16 regular members and I was not one of the people who was sitting around the conference table at the beginning of every episode. During the season I was on the show, I went to work an average of three days a month, and that's not enough to keep your mind alive. But it seems to me that TV's going through a real renaissance. I have a friend in the theater who's fond of saying that some of the best theater in the country at the moment is on HBO. If I had a pivotal role on one of those shows, I think I would find it very satisfying. But I don't particularly yearn for that kind of exposure—I find it unsettling to be recognized. Of course we'd all like to have a little more money in the bank, but I get so much satisfaction from being a member of the Broadway theater community. I love that just as much as I love doing the classical theater work. Long may it continue!

See Michael Cumpsty in Richard II at Classic Stage Company.