Godot Star Roger Rees on His London Return and His Years as a Jude Law Lookalike

Roger Rees left a lasting theatrical impression playing the title character in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, which led to a 1982 Tony Award following the Dickens adaptation's transfer to Broadway and prompted the Welshman to make New York his home. Long absent from the British stage, the actor has returned to London to join his old friend Ian McKellen in Sean Mathias' revival of a revival of Waiting for Godot, the Beckett sellout that initially paired McKellen and Patrick Stewart when it opened at the same address (the Theatre Royal, Haymarket) last year. One recent afternoon, Rees met Broadway.com in the top-floor dressing room that has been occupied over time by the likes of Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Anna Friel, and John Gielgud, and which Rees and McKellen are currently sharing during their limited run.

It’s hard to believe that Nicholas Nickleby was nearly 30 years ago.
I know! I remember it being completely exhausting and at the same time you never wanted to go to bed—you just wanted to go on stage. What’s interesting is that people very often say to me, “Well, it changed my life,” and it is a great pleasure when people come and talk to you about it. However, it also changed ours, in terms of a sense of what theater can do and also, of course, paying $100 a ticket [the then-record ticket price for a Broadway show] meant, ironically, that in the days before Times Square was cleaned up that you were stepping over bums in the gutter in order to pay $100 to see a play about bums in the gutter.

When it was over, you went back to Britain—at least for a while.
Yes. In fact what happened was that I was so indoctrinated by the apprenticeship system and the virtues of that Royal Shakespeare Company [RSC], where I'd been for almost 20 years, so I went back and played Hamlet and Berowne. If I'd had different representation, I might have thought differently. But it was always my wish to keep on being subservient to the work, so I went back and did a musical at the Young Vic called Masquerade in which Sarah Brightman played a daffodil and I played a hare. It was a lovely thing to do, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that that someone with a starrier sense of himself would have done, really. I did look sort of like Jude Law [Rees’ Broadway co-star in 1995 in Indiscretions] in those days, so I suppose I might have thought, “Oh, I could actually get some work out of this,” but I didn’t think like that. [Laughs.]

You won the Tony even though your show had closed, which these days is very rare.
I was in Bangkok filming a movie with Judi Dench called Saigon: Year of the Cat, directed by Stephen Frears, and I remember getting off the bus at the Oriental Hotel and someone down a long, long, long corridor half a mile away yelling out, "You've won the Tony," or something like that. And all of these Thai people looking around and wondering, “What on earth?” Someone must have listened to the radio.

Forgive a very industry question, but how can you be doing this run in Godot while you're a Tony nominator?
Oh, I've had to—what do you call it?—recuse myself. I’ve done two years and this was to be my third out of three. I take the job very responsibly. But I guess if you want practitioners, and I would imagine you would, to be part of the Tony-nominating scene—that’s to say, people who actually know something about what people are trying to do—then you risk them getting work away from Broadway. So it's only on this one occasion but I'm pleading with them to let me do another year or at some other time. I must say, it is a fantastically interesting process to be part of: You suddenly see how frail the theater is and how wonderful it is.

I imagine Godot was a hard offer to pass up.
This is one of the plays I’ve always wanted to do. I love Godot: it’s terribly affecting and sad—and funny, too. I’d been offered other things in London over the years, but I didn’t think they were quite right. But this seemed to fit in and I think [Vladimir} is sort of a good piece of casting. My playing this feeds into several things that I suspect I do pretty well, and of course I know Ian. We’ve been in eight plays, I think, together. He played Toby Belch [in Twelfth Night] with me as Aguecheek and we toured that with a Three Sisters in which he was Andrei and I was Tusenbach. We were in Trevor [Nunn’s] Alchemist together and The Winter’s Tale, and I was Benvolio in his Romeo and Juliet. He’s a dear friend; we get on very well.

So is this a kind of homecoming?
Well, I’ve not been staying away in any deliberate way. [Laughs.] I have spoken to some people in recent years who’ve said to me, “A lot of people think you’re dead; nobody knows who you are.” And I think, “That’s OK.” Actors’ lives aren’t meant to be one glorious ascent toward heaven. They’re meant to be: They love you, they hate you, they love you, they hate you. It’s a volatile business, and that in a way is the bravery of it.

Plus, you get to play the Haymarket.
That’s another thing about this—it’s such a great, great house. I saw Edith Evans here in The Chalk Garden and Alec Guinness in Ross, Rex Harrison and Peter O’Toole. I came to a first night once here with [playwright and novelist] Edna O’Brien, so I remember this place very strongly. Apparently [Sir John] Gielgud slept in this very dressing room during the war; he would never go home.

That’s what is so wonderful about the British theater: that sense of tradition and lineage.
I like that one generation of actors plays Richard II and Hamlet and then the next one does and they exist for the most part in the memory unless for whatever reason they are put on tape. These roles, I feel, are meant to be passed on: we’re meant to play Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale as a young boy and end up playing The Gravedigger [in Hamlet]; that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

In some ways, you must feel as if you never left London: your former RSC colleague Patrick Stewart preceded you in this very production and another one, Judi Dench, is opening shortly as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Oh, yes. Patrick and I are old, old friends, and he’s been e-mailing me notes, which is great. He’s helped me over the years on many different projects, and I’m very flattered. When Ben Kingsley joined me in the RSC—I can’t even tell you the year because it was so frighteningly long ago—the first production we were in was Trevor’s The Taming of the Shrew, and Pat [Stewart] played Grumio. And I just got a magnetic sudoku set from Judi, of which the theme is sumo wrestlers. Through the years, we have been sending each other Japanese meals and on some occasions, I sent her a sumo wrestler to deliver them. [Laughs.]

I believe they keep looking for a Broadway Higgins for the transfer of Trevor Nunn’s London production of My Fair Lady. Any interest?
Sure, especially as I sing really well now. I’ve actually been taking singing lessons for the last 10 years. Why don’t you ask Trevor about that? You can tell him that I’ve always wanted to play Higgins.

It sounds as if there’s plenty of theatrical life in you yet.
Well, people seem quite excited about this, and I’ve had some good notes at the stage door. The secret, as they say in Nicholas Nickleby, is that you carry on. I love that about actors: Unlike dancers or football players, we don’t stop at a certain time. If we can, we keep on.