The sheer joy of being back on the stage after all this time
The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin Mcdonagh, set in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, was the last play Adam Best saw before lockdown, back in November 2019.
Now he is in it, in a coproduction between the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre and Chichester Festival Theatre. It plays Chichester’s Minerva Theatre (until Oct 2 and then London (Oct 9 to Nov 6).
Obviously a lot has changed since the end of 2019 and now – not least the fact that Adam has become a dad, to five-month-old Rowan, his lockdown baby with his opera singer wife Sarah Minns. Now comes the joy of being back on the stage again.
“It’s wonderful for a number of reasons. It has been a very heavy 18 months for everybody. I think in our game the insecurity goes really deep. Just to be back in the theatre has been brilliant. I think in our profession, just doing what we do, a lot of who you are comes from being able to do it.
“My situation is that whenever I am not working as an actor, I work at other things, and I have done that ever since I have been in the profession. I think it is something that has become more and more normalised. I have got an office job that I have done for about 15 years. Every now and again I phone them and I ask ‘Do you need someone?’ I have done most gigs. I have worked for funeral directors. But the office job has been the one that has been most constant.
“And now this is my first job in the theatre since becoming adad.ihavegotamatewho is a theatre composer and I told him about having a baby, and the first thing he said was ‘Your ego will disappear!’ He didn’t mean ego in the sense of arrogance, just that suddenly you are not the centre of your own universe. You have now got something that is far more important than you are.
“And with the pandemic, in a sense, the worry about work evaporated because there was no work. So it was a good time to become parents. My wife is an opera singer. It was a good time for her as well. She didn’t feel she was missing out. It can be very difficult for mothers who are working in the performing arts.”
As for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, it’s a play Adam has known for years: “I auditioned for it to play the part of the younger brother in the Young Vic production, so I have a history with the play. But Mcdonagh’s work in general has remained on my theatrical bucket list.
They are plays that I have harboured a great ambition to do since I came out of drama school. There is something so particular about him. I don’t know if it is because he is Irish and I am Irish but his humour appeals to me, and I think it is also the way that he writes relationships as though through a mad prism or a mad lens. He seems to write extreme situations very plainly. What you are seeing is very ordinary on the surface, but underneath it is very heightened. He writes it so breezily that the weight is not heavy.
“There is something that feels very particular about it in terms of the place and the people and the history of that place that informs so much of the characters. You don’t need to be Irish to play it, but you need to have an understanding of that setting.”
Adam, recently seen in the Netflix series Giri/haji and previously in Peaky Blinders, Silent Witness and Holby City, plays Pato.
“He is this local man who has had to go to London to find work. This is set in the 1990s. This community has no work for him. Agriculture is not what it was previously. There are not the economic opportunities. So he has gone to London to work and to graft and I imagine to send money home to his brother whom we see in the play. Pato’s story is about how difficult it is for a man that has been displaced through circumstances that are out of his control… This was before the resurgence of Ireland as an economic force.”