Down and Out on the West End: Martin Shaw Tackles The Country Girl

Martin Shaw is fondly remembered by Broadway-ites for his bravura, Tony-nominated turn as Lord Goring in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in 1996. (He lost to the late George Grizzard.) But as Wilde’s comedy returns to London this season starring A Little Night Music's Alexander Hanson, Shaw is beginning his first West End run in almost five years, this time in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl, co-starring Jenny Seagrove. Odets’ drama tells of a heavy-drinking New York actor, Frank Elgin, who is given a chance at a stage comeback, having reached a personal and professional low that the 65-year-old Shaw, thank heavens, has not experienced. (In addition to the play, he stars in the British TV series Inspector George Gently.) Broadway.com spoke to the ever-engaging actor during the final week of the play’s UK tour. It begins a run at London’s Apollo Theatre on October 6 and will open on October 11.

The Country Girl is a play about the theater. How authentic does Clifford Odets’ 1950 portrait of stage life seem to you?
I actually think it’s the most realistic play about the business that I have come across. Usually, when you see a film about films, they manage to get it wrong. But although this is set very much in the American theater, I recognize in it that wave of visceral realism that was raging through the British theater when I first started.

You mean the plays of John Osborne and the like?
Yes, that ethos that said there was something more to the theater than just the drawing room comedies that had been so popular in England for so long. I’d already come across that change in perception at drama school [LAMDA], where there were lots of Americans at the time: people like Swoosie Kurtz, Stacy Keach, Michael Moriarty.

It’s interesting how much of your theater career has been defined by American work— not just Odets but Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire [opposite Claire Bloom] and an aging Elvis Presley in Are You Lonesome Tonight.
And I was rung up by the Old Vic a year or two ago asking me to do Inherit the Wind, but I turned it down; I just wanted a bit of a break. I do love America—the Pacific Northwest, especially Puget Sound, where I’ve spent some time, is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I remember when I was doing Streetcar being very aware that it was an absolute turning point in my career. It helped that we had an American director, Edwin Sherin, who was and still is the greatest director I have ever worked with. He had a dictatorial style that was extremely powerful; he was one of those directors who told you what to do and you did it [laughs].

You must have been pleased to do An Ideal Husband at the same Broadway theater [the Barrymore] where Streetcar was first seen in 1947.
I even wondered briefly whether I had Marlon Brando’s dressing room, but in fact it was most likely Jessica Tandy’s. I was certainly very aware that I was in the same theater; that sort of thing happens all the time. [The Country Girl tour played] at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, where I first worked in 1969 on a Peter Shaffer play, The Battle of Shrivings, with John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller. I don’t think they’ve even vacuumed the carpet since!

What’s fascinating is that you have done The Country Girl before.
Yes, on the West End nearly 30 years ago, playing Bernie, the director [now played by Mark Letheren], not Frank, the actor. Fortunately, I remember the spirit and the feel of that production but not the specifics; it’s not as if I stand there mouthing along with Mark’s lines! What’s great about coming back to it is that, firstly, it’s very, very well-written—beautifully written—and, secondly, it’s about redemption. We hope by the end that Frank has found a way of redeeming himself, though you don’t ever quite know, which is good. It’s nice to leave an audience thinking.

Frank is a has-been and a lush, two qualities with which presumably you can’t identify.
I used to drink and then decided overnight not to about 40 years ago. It was something of a spiritual thing. But I certainly know first-hand the world of this play. There was a helluva lot of heavy drinking going on in the British theater in the 1960s.

You mean the celebrated hell-raisers like Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris and Richard Burton?
Others, as well; it was almost like a badge of honor at the time. But there came a particular point when it just seemed to me stupid and self-defeating and I thought, “I want nothing to do with that.” I wanted to be different! And, I have to say, I do feel this time that it’s even more visceral and gut-wrenching a play to perform than it was in 1983. That’s possibly to do with my interpretation of Frank being quite literally ripped out of me. It’s a very uncomfortable play to perform.

That’s intriguing, since Morgan Freeman was very low-key in the same role on Broadway two seasons ago.
That’s a safer way of doing it. Our director [Rufus Norris] does encourage daring.

So, you get to do Americans on the West End and a quintessential Brit like Lord Goring on Broadway.
You know, I have to pinch myself that that time in New York [in An Ideal Husband] actually happened. It was joyous to work in front of a Broadway audience, like a dream come true. The quality of attention was very, very strong—rather more so, may I say, than we got during most of the run in London. And then to see the reviews and to have the Drama Desk Award...it was wonderful.

What is your memory of Tony night?
Intense excitement, followed by disappointment [when he lost], followed by a philosophical glow. And, I mean, to be on the same nominations list as George C. Scott! [Scott also lost for Inherit the Wind.]

Did the Broadway acclaim fuel any career opportunities in America?
I got offered a role in a TV production about the American Revolution, but the money was derisory, so I said no. To this day, I’m not sure what of my work has been seen in America. I do get Americans who write to me and leave comments on YouTube. I would have thought Judge John Deed is shown there [his series opposite Country Girl co-star Jenny Seagrove] and maybe The Professionals [which dates back to the late 70s].

And yet, despite your regular TV appearances, you consistently return to the stage.
I always try to maintain the theater work. It’s about reminding people, in this country especially, that you can do more than one thing. In America, they’re much more allowing of you going from one medium to another. Here, they like to put you in a box.

I see that The Country Girl company includes your own son, Luke.
All three of my children are in the profession. Luke is 40 and my daughter, Sophie, who’s four or five years younger, was in A Man for All Seasons before this. It makes me smile that they have followed in my footsteps, but it also worries me because it’s such a shrinking profession. It’s not the way it was when I was starting: There’s very little regional repertory and there are only two TV companies, both of which are intent on doing one another down! But if they want to do a play with their father, I absolutely encourage it. Why wouldn’t I?