SHREK STAR
TURNS LAW MAN
PLAYING A low-rent Luton lawyer in a new play by Nick Payne at the Donmar Warehouse, Nigel Lindsay is certainly spending a lot less time in wardrobe than he did for his previous show. The role of Barry in The Same Deep Water As Me is one requiring Lindsay — one of this country’s most powerful stage actors — to don a shabby suit. And as he steps in front of the dressing room mirror to affix Barry’s favourite bowling- club tie, he may half expect to see the green-skinned, trumpeteared face of Shrek staring back at him.
For his two years starring in Shrek The Musical, Lindsay spent an hour-and-a-half daily in make-up, he recalls on a lunch break from rehearsing Payne’s play about the seedy world of “no-win no-fee” law firms.
“On matinee days, I had to leave it on for 10 hours. I couldn’t even take it off in the two hours between shows.” Did “Shrek” ever nip out to get a sandwich? “It was against my contract. I would bring in food in the morning from Marks and have a sandwich. But it was quite difficult to eat with the green skin on. It was even difficult to sleep because you would have to lie flat. You couldn’t turn on your side because you might break an ear.”
Taking on the lead in one of the biggest productions in the history of musical theatre was a big culture shock for Lindsay. The son of an East End-born businessman who worked in the “shmutter trade”, he is best known to theatre-goers as a straight-backed charismatic presence on stage. His roles include the manfully wise Doctor Hyman in Arthur Miller’s psychological Holocaust play Breaking Glass, and the streetwise war veteran in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing. And then there is the misogynist pimp in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. On screen, the roles tend to have more of a comedy bent, such as rampant capitalist Jason in the latest Alan Partridge movie,