A West End Debut at 82? Estelle Parsons Logs Another Career First in Deathtrap

It seems fitting that Estelle Parsons should be inhabiting a dressing room named for Gertrude Lawrence while appearing in London in Deathtrap: a great lady of the American stage inhabiting a playhouse [the Noel Coward Theatre] boasting some great English names. Parsons has worked on the London stage before, some three decades ago, when she brought her acclaimed off-Broadway show Miss Margarida’s Way to north London’s Hampstead Theatre. But until the current Ira Levin revival, starring Simon Russell Beale and Jonathan Groff, the Oscar winner and four-time Tony nominee had never actually played the West End. The actress, looking chipper and amazingly fit for someone soon to be 83, spoke to Broadway.com before a recent performance, her passion for the theater evident in almost every turn of phrase.

It seems astonishing that you have never previously played the West End.
That’s why I came. I had never been here on stage except to do Miss Margarida at the Hampstead. I was always bringing up kids: The son we adopted was born in 1983, and I was raising twin girls before that, so whenever there was an offer I was usually busy. Now I can do what I want to do.

How did this offer come your way?
Well, you know, Anna Massey was supposed to do it and decided not to and so David [Pugh, the producer of Deathtrap] was talking to my agent who is also [co-star] Terry Beaver’s agent and David said, “Who would you suggest?” I was mentioned, and it turned out that David had seen me play Miss Margarida when he was a teenager, so he hired me.

And so off you were to London, having just spent the better part of two years on Broadway and then on tour as Violet Weston in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County.
I was going to take this year off. I had just gotten home and had all these huge personal life plans, and then this come up and I thought, “I’d really like to work over there [London],” so off I go! It was very tough for my husband and for myself, but I was home for a couple of months beforehand, so that was good. I had thought I wouldn’t work for a while because I had done August for so long and it was such a hard play to do. “Hard” is a stupid word—let’s say “agitating,” very agitating, because the people in it were very cruel.

What do you think of the recently announced principal actresses for the film version of August?
Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts? I had thought of it as the sort of play that maybe Mike Leigh would do, or I was hoping they would hire Fred Schepisi, who did HBO’s Empire Falls with Paul [Newman] and Joanne [Woodward] and myself because you knew he would make it like the play—though why should it be like the play? This way, it will just be a big star vehicle; they’ll probably get stars for all the parts, so it won’t be the same thing at all. But it couldn’t be the same thing, don’t you think? It was so purely theater.

It was thrilling to see how the British took to August and vice versa when the original company did it here at the National Theatre.
Oh yes, they all came back from that experience so excited, all of them. It was wonderful.

Deathtrap in its own, very different way is purely theatrical— which may be why the 1982 film version of it isn’t very good.
A friend of mine told me about the movie, but I didn’t want to see it, though I did think, “If Irene Worth can play this character [Helga ten Dorp] then so can I!” [Laughs.]

Especially in a city like London, where these sorts of plays still thrive in a way they don’t in New York.
Sometimes people think I’m saying The Mousetrap when I say I’m in Deathtrap: “Oh, yeah, that’s been running forever,” and I have to go, “That’s the other one.” [Laughs.] I do have to go see it, though, because it has been running forever!

I bet you never thought you would play a comical Dutch psychic.
Oh, you know, Ira Levin writes wonderful characters. You can really dive into them, so I’m always discovering new things. Also, I like [Helga] a lot, which does surprise me; I think she’s great. She’s very different from me, of course, but she’s been fun to work on. I asked Ira’s sons why she’s Dutch because that seems odd, and the way he’s written it with bad grammar is not really a Dutch thing. Every Dutch person I showed it to in New York said, “This is not a Dutch problem, grammar, it’s more Eastern European.” The sons didn’t know; they just thought he picked it out of the air.

Did [2009 Tony winner] Matthew Warchus, your director, have a particular line on the play, given how rare comic thrillers are these days?
I don’t know, because I was almost never called to rehearsals. Every time I was there, it seemed like he was trying to figure out all that fighting and the physical stuff with Simon and Jonathan. But Matthew does have a very definite idea that theater should be theatrical, with which I wholeheartedly agree. That sort of thinking went out of style for a while in favor of everything being “real,” which means…what? Real life? So I was very pleased when he made a speech about being theatrical, and of course, that’s what he did with La Bete, with Boeing-Boeing—he does that with everything.

As you look back on your life in the theater, do you feel like part of a vanishing breed, to some extent? Has the profession moved on?
I don’t know if the profession has moved on as much as the theater has moved on, and the choice of what you can watch—what with movies on demand—has become so large. What I’ve noticed throughout my life, and made my peace with, is that rather than it being a Broadway audience of 1,000 or 1,500, the group of people I’m going to entertain is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller. I like to do cutting-edge stuff—challenging stuff, like [Uncivil Wars] this Brecht thing at the Kitchen on 18th Street that I did with David Gordon. That’s what I like to do when I can, and there’s just not a very big audience for it.

I hope you’re planning some sort of memoir or written account of your life and work.
I was working on one with a journalist from San Francisco and we spent a lot of time together talking it through, but I couldn’t get my head around it. I don’t really want to say things about other people, and everybody seems to think that’s an important component—you’ve got to get a lot of hot gossip or no one will publish it. But I don’t like to talk about myself, and I don’t like to share my, uh, “things,” and in the end I just didn’t feel I wanted to do it. It’s funny: I read a review in the New Yorker about a book that is about memoirs, starting back with St. Paul, and it had this comment from Freud who apparently said that he would never write a memoir. And I thought, “Aha, good! If Freud doesn’t want to do it, I don’t either!”