If there was an award for the quickest rehearsal of a role, Con O’Neill would win it. He talks to Caroline Bishop about his speedily created performance in Prick Up Your Ears.
Con O’Neill had just nine days to learn 112 pages of dialogue and create a performance before presenting it in front of a paying West End audience. It is no wonder that, when we speak on the phone a few days after that first performance, the actor is exhausted and “perpetually in a daze”. It is not a situation he has ever found himself in before and, perhaps thankfully, “probably never will again”.
It has been an extraordinary experience for O’Neill and one which came about due to exceptional – and tragic – circumstances. Simon Bent’s play Prick Up Your Ears, about the ultimately destructive relationship between playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell during the 1960s, had faced the press just a few days earlier when Matt Lucas, one third of the cast, pulled out following the death of his former civil partner. Shortly after, Lucas’s co-star Chris New put in a call to O’Neill to ask if he would be willing to take on the role of Halliwell for the remainder of the show’s run.
“So I went to see the show on the Saturday evening,” says O’Neill. “And by the end of the show thought it was all a bit too big a hurdle really. So I went back to tell Chris I wasn’t going to do it. And in the conversation that then passed he came out with the phrase, ‘if you don’t try it I think you will always regret not giving it a go because it’s such a unique experience’, and that just stayed in my head.”
New’s words worked because within days O’Neill found himself shaving his head to play Halliwell to New’s Orton. “I did that almost immediately, and I woke up about three days after I’d done it literally saying the words ‘f**k I’ve shaved my head!’ You can’t back out; you’ve got a bald head, who else is going to employ you?”
Shaving his hair off was the simplest part of what was a courageous plunge to take. Having never before met the director Daniel Kramer and with just six afternoons to rehearse with his co-stars New and Gwen Taylor – who were still performing each evening with understudy Michael Chadwick as Halliwell – O’Neill had to totally alter his usual way of working in order to be ready to perform in little over a week. It is an experience he describes succinctly as an “eye-opener”.
“I’m a happy bloke, I don’t intend to be miserable because I play miserable people every now and then”
“It’s certainly not the way I’d like to work, but because it was so immediate you had to cut through a lot of your own insecurity and a lot of your own crap and just get on with it,” he says. Instead of a normal four-week rehearsal period in which he would gradually build trust with his director, he “had to start trusting my own instincts and Daniel’s instincts immediately and that I found difficult. The hardest part of this has been forging a relationship with the director so quickly. He’s a wonderful director but I’m not somebody who immediately goes ‘ok I’ll trust you 100 per cent’. I have been let down in the past so it’s not something that I will immediately say.”
Then there were the practicalities. He had no time to research the character as he normally would – “the only thing I’ve read in two weeks is the script” – and learning the lines has been “a f**king nightmare!” For the first two live performances he was constantly thinking two or three lines ahead, scared that he was going to forget his words. “Usually when you dry on stage it’s an immediate thing, you come to your line, you can’t remember your line. I’ve had nights in this play where I know there’s a line in four or five seconds where I haven’t f**king got a clue what it is, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “I’m not a writer, the stuff I make up isn’t good.”
It is no wonder that O’Neill is knackered. The tiredness, he says, “comes from always having the edge of fear just prickling on the back of your neck”. But with each performance that fear is dissolving and being replaced with enjoyment, a feeling that, until now, he has lacked. “The important thing for me is I’m enjoying it now and I feel that my performance is up there with Chris and Gwen’s so I’m not sticking out like a sore thumb. My only fear with this was that I wouldn’t be on a par with them.”
If anyone had a shot at getting up to scratch on time, it was O’Neill. He is an award-winning actor who is best known for playing another highly troubled real-life character from the 1960s, Joe Meek in Telstar. After receiving a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for playing the manic record producer in Nick Moran’s play in the West End, O’Neill reprised the role on screen earlier this year. It is not hard to draw similarities between Meek and Halliwell, the RADA graduate who found himself in the shadow of his more successful partner, Orton, amid the British cultural scene of the 1960s. Both men were gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal, both were talented yet psychologically troubled and both, in the same year, 1967, ended their own lives after killing someone else – Meek shot his landlady while Halliwell murdered Orton. “They are both fraught, frightening, arrogant men who are lost. So I think having done all that work on Telstar, that helped me on the emotional path of the character,” says O’Neill.
“There’s a bravado to Joe Meek that as an actor I’d never experienced in a character before, and I think that transcribes quite well to Kenneth,” he adds. “And I think there’s a certain heightened theatricality to their character which had I not played Joe would have taken me some time to be able to plug into. They were both haunted men and both had huge self-loathing issues and were genuinely talented but not quite accepting of the industry around them. But as many similarities [as there are], there are differences. Kenneth is a very, very complex man in a very different way to Joe.”
“I’ve had nights in this play where I know there’s a line in four or five seconds where I haven’t f**king got a clue what it is”
Whatever the complexities of the character, O’Neill can be relied upon to throw himself into the role completely. He has proven himself to be a bold, highly physical actor who performs entirely unselfconsciously, whether he is giving a saliva-fuelled anti-feminist rant as taxi-driver Frank in The Female Of The Species or masturbating on stage as scorned husband Dave in the excruciatingly intimate Faces In The Crowd at the Royal Court earlier this year. Does he never feel embarrassed by the intense physicality he gives to his roles? “No. To be honest the most embarrassing moment of any of those things, whether you’re getting your kit off, whether you’re having sex on stage, is the first time you do it. So for me, if I have to be naked in something, I’ll get it out as soon as I can, just so I can get used to it,” he says, adding that he would never do anything he thought was gratuitous. “If it doesn’t feel completely justifiable I wouldn’t do it. I’m in my 40s, what the f**k do I want to take my clothes off for?”
Faces In The Crowd, he says, was a particularly difficult play to shake off at the end of a performance, and he admits he has always found it difficult to unwind after a show: “At my age it tends to be movies and home, because I look deeply embarrassing on the dance floor.” But he has learnt, at least, to leave the angst of his characters behind when he steps out of the theatre. “You can feel exhausted at the end of it but I don’t allow those characters to walk home with me at night, that would just be mad, and I don’t want that. I’m perfectly happy in my own skin and turning off the light in my dressing room and leaving that character there. I’m a happy bloke, I don’t intend to be miserable because I play miserable people every now and then.”
“At the end of the day all the turmoil you go through on the job, for me anyway, is in the rehearsal process,” he says. “The rehearsal process isn’t just about getting the play right, it’s about you as an actor finding the journey emotionally and once that journey is planned out it then becomes the technique and it then becomes the job.”
Perhaps there is something to be said for short rehearsal periods then. Having put himself through such a rushed, intense introduction to this play, O’Neill now has just a couple of weeks to play Halliwell before Prick Up Your Ears comes to a premature end on 15 November. It seems a shame given all the effort he has put in, but at least he intends to reward himself afterwards. “Right now I’m thinking of a beach somewhere,” he says, “and growing my hair back.” Whatever the man wants, he has certainly earned it.
CB