As he prepares to return to live theatre – in his wife’s acclaimed play about male friendship – the actor reflects on a tumultuous 18 months, and on why he needs an audience
In the short and possibly quite nerve-racking break between an afternoon rehearsal and an evening preview, Adrian Lester is trying both to eat a sandwich and to find the right words to describe to me (via Zoom) what he and his co-star have been doing to their already much acclaimed production of Lolita Chakrabarti’s play Hymn ahead of its long-delayed opening at the Almeida theatre in Islington. “I suppose you could say that we’ve had to ‘un-camera’ it for the stage,” he tells me, wiping what might be mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. “But of course what we’ve really done is to go back to the original idea of it, because the play was written, and rehearsed, for a live audience. It was only when the first lockdown began and Rupert [Goold, the Almeida’s artistic director] said that we were going to carry on with the production, no matter what, that we made the decision to film and live stream it.”
If you were one of those who saw Hymn on screen last February, you may perhaps be wondering why any changes at all are required, even allowing for the fact that the rules are different now; the strict social distancing of Lester and his co-star, Danny Sapani, mirrored so powerfully the emotional distance between their characters. But perhaps this isn’t important. In the end, what really matters – to Lester and Sapani, at least – is that this time around they will be able to see and hear their audience. “It was very strange last year,” he says. “Doing things we thought would be funny or touching with no physical audience.” However much damage the pandemic has inflicted on the theatre, he can’t help but think that it has also given us a renewed grasp of the role art plays in our lives. “After last night’s preview, people said how moving it was to be alongside strangers after so much time apart, reacting to the same things at the same moment. We’re pack animals. We’ve missed the collective experience. We need to be together.”