Irons back to roots
The Bristol Old Vic turns 250 this year. To light the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre has summoned home one of its most splendid alumni. Jeremy Irons — Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, an Oscar winner as Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, not forgetting the lordly larynx of Scar in The Lion King — arrived at the theatre’s drama school in 1969 and in due course joined the company. Although the London schools now dominate theatrical training, in his day the Bristol Old Vic school attracted top-drawer future stars, also including Daniel Day-Lewis and Olivia Colman.
“I had such happy times in Bristol,” Irons says in that hard-crusted drawl of his, once described as the sound of chocolate on gravel.
The role that has called him back to the British stage for the first time in six years is one of the biggest going: James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night. It perhaps explains the respectable threads — no biker leathers today.
Otherwise the face is a pinched and craggy version of what a generation fell in love with in the 1980s: the thin, cruel upper lip, the berry-brown eyes and the heavy brow.
At 67, Irons claims his appetite for work is not what it was and he’d happily put his feet up for a year “if I knew that I had a job that I really wanted to do in a year’s time.”