'We're all fascinated with our past' Stockard Channing and David Westhead bring Beckett to Edinburgh Fringe
Stockard Channing and David Westhead started in theatre and now the Grease and West Wing star makes her directorial debut with a Fringe production of Beckett’s darkly humorous Krapp’s Last Tape starring her old friend. They talk friendship, the play’s relevance and The Wembley To Soweto Foundation.
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Ask old friends Channing and Westhead a question and they’re off and running, interjecting, laughing and finishing each other’s sentences as they talk about bringing Channing’s directorial debut play, Krapp’s Last Tape, starring Westhead to the Edinburgh Fringe next month.
They’re familiar faces from TV and theatre - 82-year-old Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress Channing was the coolest thing about Grease as lead Pink Lady Rizzo, played First Lady Abbey Bartlet in The West Wing and starred with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic, before doubling down on her first love of theatre and becoming a major player in London’s West End after relocating to London in 2014 following the death of her long term partner cinematographer Daniel Gillham.
Meanwhile best buddy actor and producer Westhead, 63, also made his name on stage with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre and The Royal Court Theatre, before earning a host of TV credits, including The Bill, Criminal Justice, Bramwell and W1A.
So why did they choose Krapp’s Last Tape, the 1958 play by master of the absurd, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, with its dark humour leavening themes of exile, failure and an incomprehensible world to bring to the Fringe?
Channing: David can answer that because he's the one who chose it.
Westhead: OK, so 25 years ago, there I am in Lithuania...
Channing: This is very long story. I’ve heard it a million times.
Westhead: I had a day off filming and thought I might see a bit of theater, didn’t fancy Shakespear but at the top of one of the posters was a bit of paper with an arrow saying ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. I followed the arrow and 20 metres down the road there’s another, then another and 20 minutes later I'm on the 12th story of a Soviet apartment block in some bloke's front room with five others and in the corner there’s the bloke with a tape recorder doing Krapp’s Last Tape. I thought, ‘that's genius’, I’ll do that when I’m old enough.”
Which 23 years on is now.
“I thought I haven’t been on stage for a while, who am I going to ask to do this? It wasn't a difficult choice. I bullied my mate into directing me. She wanted to run a mile. But here we are.”
According to Channing: “We were having dinner when he asked me and I said ‘I have no desire to do that’. But then…”
Two years on Channing and Westhead have toured the play in various venues up and down the country, with the entire production, set, costume, lights (built by Geoff and Pete, tradesmen who were doing some work in Westhead’s home) all packed in the back of his Ford C-MAX car, driven by son Alfie who runs the sound.
“I think it's a hugely Edinburgh Festival show,” says Westhead. “Because you're on your own against the world in the theatre and you try to make the audience part of the experience. Then you go out after and you're part of a communal experience in the city. It'll be great to be part of the vibe and because I'm done at half past two I can go and see other shows.”
“Basically acting is about making a reality that communicates to an audience, taking a text and making it alive,” says Channing, ”That's it. What has appealed over the couple of years we’ve been doing this show to audiences ranging from 32 to 250 people, is it’s relevant to the age we live in. We're taking pictures all the time and documenting our lives and this is about aspiration, the past and memory.”
Krapp’s Last Tape is about a 69-year-old man with a tape recorder who has been recording himself every year on his birthday since he was 20. As well as making a recording, he listens to a tape from his past, chosen at random, and on this occasion is listening to his 39-year-old self, who has just listened to himself at 23.
“For the 39 year old, life is going to be wonderful, and we see this man at 69 who has not had a successful life, hearing this and commenting,” says Channing.
For Westhead, now in his sixties, the play has come of age.
“The funny thing is I'm almost the same age as the character, and you've experienced everything that's talked about: parental death, abject failure, lots of ambition, huge loss of love on a consistent basis. It's things that you can associate with.
“People get scared of Beckett,” says Channing, “but this is unbelievably accessible and something every human can relate to. We're all fascinated with our past and aspirations for the future. But to be in the room with your own self at 39, at 23, is impressive.”
Also keeping things simple is the fact that the Beckett estate doesn’t allow any changes to the script or staging.
“I have a pair of white boots, which are referred to as ‘a surprising pair of white boots’, tapered towards the end, size 10 and a half. Well, I'm an eight and a half so I've got the end of it packed with newspaper,” says Westhead.
What if you have size 12 feet?
“Well, then you've got to wear sandals. Or file off the edge of your boots and paint the end of your feet white. Who knows?,” laughs Westhead.
The pair met in 1999 filming in Luxembourg, when they were cast as husband and wife in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, directed by Gavin Millar (who also directed the BBC’s acclaimed Crow Road TV adaptation), adapted from the fantasy novel by Wicked writer Greg Maguire, and have been friends ever since.
“Having known each other 26 years, we have memories we share and can look back on,“ says Westhead. “And I knew when there's cars with luggage in the back and painters and decorators making sets and a kid running the show, it’s right up our street, and it's hilarious. I couldn't trust anybody more than I trust Stockard. Without blowing smoke in the appropriate place, her ability to direct is forensic.”
Channing agrees: “We tap back into all these years, go and see films together, evaluate performance and our taste is very similar. You know, we mouth off. And we like each other. So that kind of trust is real and that's a very important thing.”
Who do they think the play will appeal to?
“Well, it’s saying whatever the audience wants it to say and people relate to it on whatever level they want. And we’ve had all ages watching,” says Channing.
He continues: “One person in the Q and A said they found the concept of recording yourself very moving because when their friend was dying they used to write a diary every day but by the end he couldn't write anymore so he did it for him.
“And also young people get a lot out of it, because they find all the funny bits funny because they are universal, and also at the moment it's not easy for young people and the future is very uncertain, so looking back on a man whose past was uncertain melds together very well. We’ve been surprised how well it goes down, given that it’s something that goes in the back of a van. It's insane.”
It’s obvious the absurdity of the operation appeals to the pair and is entirely in keeping with a Beckett performance, but it’s also integral to keeping costs down as all profits from the performances go towards a charity set up by Westhead and professional photographer John Cole in 2010, The Wembley to Soweto Foundation.
Emerging from the backdrop of the World Cup in South Africa, it has provided photographic training and life-skills to disadvantaged young people across Africa, Europe, The UK, Russia, The Middle East, The United States and Brazil and impacted their lives and that of their families and communities, with the youngsters becoming professional photographers and teachers.
One of these is Tom Harrison who learnt photography with the charity in 2012 and has since gone on to win portrait photographer of the year and took some of the images of Channing and Westhead accompanying this interview.
“We’ve worked with people from the townships of South Africa to the favelas of Brazil, through to gang-related young people in LA, and that's extraordinary because all of them have massive potential. It's just that education has passed them by, but now we're trying to give them a key to unlock the door that takes them elsewhere. We've got an East London kid who worked at Poundland who's now in China running her own photography course in Chinese, having got a business degree from Beijing University. These kids are capable of a huge amount. It's amazing where they go. It's like us getting in a rocket and going to the moon, the difference it makes,” says Westhead.
Wherever possible on tour, at stagings of Krapp’s Last Tape, an exhibition of the students' work is displayed.
“We plan to do more of that in the future so we’ve got these young, disadvantaged people we train to be photographers putting their memories on a wall next door to somebody talking about their memories on the tape recorder in the play. That wasn't intentional, it just happened like that,” says Westhead.
What they hope to do when Krapp’s Last Tape arrives in Edinburgh is establish links with local football teams, Hibernian and Heart of Midlothian. (Westhead lives in Brighton where the club is owned by Tony Bloom who has a stake in Hearts.)
“If Hearts or Hibs want to join up with us…” says Westhead. “We do a course with the kids and on the football side give them a little tour at the stadium and they might get to go pitch side. We've done that with rivals Arsenal and Tottenham at the same time, Manchester City, we've done it with all sorts of Premier League clubs. And it links up so well with Samuel Beckett.”
For Channing, the move into directing was unexpected and she returns to the Chinese dinner when she said: “This is not really what I set out to do with my life.”
However, once she read the text and watched recordings of performances she was hooked.
“It’s fascinating,” she says, but is modest about her directorial role. “The only thing I’ve really done, because the text and costumes are fixed, is the tempo [the speed, pacing, and rhythm of action and dialogue]. It's like being a conductor. The character comes out of the text and David's own personality has taken it forward.
“Beckett wrote it specifically for the actor Patrick Magee who took 33 minutes to smash through it. John Hurt took an hour, and we take about 43. It's almost like a dance routine, step, ball, change, and you move and an order gets in your body and you just do it. And that's where David is now.”
Westhead confirms the running time, laughing as he explains the sole aberration.
“Alfie and I set up the show, and as they gave us clearance to start in two minutes I said, ‘Alfie, I’ve forgotten the bananas - which are an integral part of the show. He legged it to a greengrocer and came back, literally a minute later, with bananas. The only problem was these bananas were massive and that put two minutes on the show.”
With timing crucial, Channing and Westhead are delighted to hear about the one o’clock gun, when a cannon is fired at the castle, providing an alarm for their show which starts at 1.25pm Upstairs at The Roxy.
“When you hear a cannon that means run to see Krapp’s Last Tape,” says Westhead.
With a background in both theatre and film, what is it about being on the stage that has drawn them both back, Stockard having started out in Bertolt Brecht’sThe Threepenny Opera after she ran away from university to ‘join the circus’.
“Theatre is the foundation of everything else,” she says. “It’s my home, what changed my life and it’s become my foundation. If I look at a film script, I'm looking at it the same way as I look at a theatre piece, because you're playing someone in a set circumstances and it's always about that.
Westhead agrees: ”It’s what I'm trained to do. The reason I concentrated on film and television is because I had two kids and couldn't afford to go on the stage. Now we’ve booted them both out of the nest - one of them comes on the road but he doesn't get paid very much - it's happy days.”
Which is another of Beckett’s famous plays. Any plans to do that next?
“We’ll see,” laughs Westhead.
As for Channing, she’ll be on cinema screens shortly alongside Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bulloch in Practical Magic 2, the follow up to the 1998 American romantic fantasy Practical Magic, reprising her role as Aunt Franny 28 years on.
“Making the first one was a life experience and the first day I stepped on the set this time and saw Nic and Sandy we were just screaming and hugging each other. A lot has happened in all our lives in 28 years, it's extraordinary. And it was a film that was never a success at the time. People didn't understand what it was but it has a fan base that's massive so Warner Brothers invested in the new film.”
It’s time for the pair to hit the road but we can’t let Channing go without asking about Grease. Does she still have her Pink Ladies jacket or anything else from that film? Her answer is short and sweet.
“No. Nothing. Who knew? I needed a job and I did the job, and that was a very long time ago.
I don't look back. Unlike Mr Beckett, I don't look back.”
Channing and Westhead are all about the here and now, and outside there’s a battered car to pack and a play to perform as the old friends become Edinburgh bound.
Krapp’s Last Tape, Upstairs at The Roxy, 1.25pm, August 5 – 31, for tickets see https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/krapps-last-tape
All profits from the show go to The Wembley to Soweto Foundation - www.wembleytosoweto.com
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