Irons Identifies With 'Real Thing' Role
by Leslie Bennets, The New York Times
January 9, 1984
THE handsome, brooding face of Jeremy Irons is familiar to millions of Americans as that of Charles Ryder, the protagonist of ''Brideshead Revisited,'' the dramatization of Evelyn Waugh's novel that ran on public television. In film, starring roles in ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' and ''Betrayal'' helped to confirm his growing reputation as a leading man of the movies.
But although Mr. Irons began his career as a stage actor and although he is a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, until last week he had yet to make his mark in the American theater. His highly acclaimed Broadway debut as the star of Tom Stoppard's new play, ''The Real Thing,'' has changed all that.
The role of Henry, a brilliant, arrogant playwright of dazzling wit and verbal facility, has given Mr. Irons a tour-de-force part to mark a major milestone in his career.
''I had been looking for a play for three years, but if I had commissioned someone to write me a play they could never have written anything this perfect,'' says the 35-year- old actor. ''When I read it I thought, 'This should be the play to bring me to New York.' I wanted something that would make me go off with a bang, not a whimper, and I thought, 'This is the play I have done all this high-profile work to be asked to do.' ''
Getting Typed for a Role
For a while, Mr. Irons seemed to be developing a reputation for the kind of understated, quintessentially English roles he played in ''Brideshead'' and ''The French Lieutenant's Woman.'' Charles Ryder epitomized the credo of the ''stiff upper lip and 'creamy English charm,' as Waugh put it,'' Mr. Irons notes. ''He was a man who kept his emotions deeply hidden and didn't give very much, who certainly didn't give any of his real self. When I read 'Brideshead,' I understood Ryder completely. I really think Ryder is the man I was educated to be. He is everything an actor isn't or shouldn't be.''
The son of a chartered accountant, Mr. Irons drifted into acting after his dismal performance in school thwarted his initial ambition to become a veterinarian, a goal based primarily on a desire for ''the way of life of my childhood - of living in the country with dogs and horses - to continue forever,'' he says.
Confronted with the unwelcome necessity of finding something else to do with his life, he realized that the three things he had enjoyed most were ''riding horses, playing rugby, and doing plays. Since there wasn't much of a career in the first two, I thought I'd try the third,'' Mr. Irons recalls.
The role of Charles Ryder marked a significant turning point not only in Mr. Irons's career but also in his personal development. ''I hope it was an expunging from my person and my life of that withheld emotion, that lack of real emotional giving to people, of that sort of studied objectivity to life where you stand back and appear to join in, but don't really,'' he says. ''I think there was a strong part of me that was like that, but it's much less now. I've begun to learn that the more you give to people the more you receive, in life as on the stage.''
In his work, Mr. Irons began to transcend his stiff-upper-lip typecasting with his performance as an increasingly panicky and manipulative Polish laborer in England in the Jerzy Skolimowski film ''Moonlighting.'' But the scope of his role in ''The Real Thing'' offers Mr. Irons an enviable opportunity to evolve onstage from the brittle repartee of Henry's opening scenes to a howl of anguish as the second act begins its denouement.
'Great Range' in Emotions
''It's a wonderful role, because it allows one to play a great range, from flippant comedy to deeply felt pain,'' Mr. Irons observes. ''Personally, it touched me; it said things about love and commitment that I felt but couldn't possibly say because I don't have the brilliance Tom Stoppard has. And on a career level, since I have been known since 'Brideshead' for these people who are superficially cold, who don't show a lot or give a lot out, I wanted to use the fame those roles had given me to show what I could really do.''
After four years' absence from the theater, Mr. Irons has been required by the play to brush up his stage technique. ''I had forgotten how tiring it is to concentrate like that for two-and- a-half hours,'' he says ruefully. ''Film is a different sort of concentration. You spend your waking hours thinking about what you're going to be filming and where you are as an actor, because it's all out of sequence, and practicing a strange sort of concentration that allows you to wait around for long periods of time and yet be in the freshest, most interested state when you have to go in front of the camera. But here there are some very fast gear changes, because the scenes move on very fast and your situation is different. It's not just concentration, it's mental agility.
'' When you're saying lines you've said so many times before, one of the hardest thing is not to fall into vocal patterns, but you have to do it in a way that makes it seem to be the first time it's happened. And it's wonderful to have to play that two-hour arc, to rise to the challenge of Stoppard's character, and to get my feet back on the ground in the theater, which I know is good for me.''
Many observers have noted the strongly autobiographical aspects to Mr. Stoppard's portrayal of Henry, and the playwright says Mr. Irons was among those actors he thought of for the part from the beginning. However, Mr. Irons was not available for the London production, in which Roger Rees starred.
Two Similar Souls
Both Mr. Stoppard and Mr. Irons agree that they are much alike. ''I think Tom's soul and my soul must be quite similar,'' Mr. Irons muses. ''Although he's Czech, I think his love of England, of exact language, of manners, of style, of clothes, all are a lot like me. I'd love to think I was as loving as Tom, but I don't think I'm quite as generous as he is. And I sort of instinctively knew Henry. I like his lack of self-consciousness, and the way he has a craft that he's good at. I like his boyishness; there's a lot of the child in Henry, and I've always believed that in every man there's a little boy trying to get out.''
Mr. Irons also identifies with Henry's relationship with Annie, his wife, particularly Henry's tendency to batter Annie into silence by the sheer force of his verbal pyrotechnics. ''My wife and I have perhaps three subjects we disagree about, and I can win every argument, but the next time the subject comes up, she still has the same opinions,'' reports Mr. Irons, who is married to Sinead Cusack, an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company. ''It's a matter of learning that you can't possess a person. During the course of the play, Henry realizes that Annie's ideas are valid just because they're hers, and that the fact that he can argue them out and win the argument doesn't mean they're any less valid.''
Mr. Irons has signed on to play Henry until June, and for the moment he has no other commitments. His long-range plans include the intention to spend a couple of years doing Shakespeare before he turns 40, ''purely because of the way Shakespeare stretches you,'' he explains. ''There's really no other playwright that develops those muscles the same way. Actors tend to set their stamp in their 30's, and then consolidate in their 40's and 50's. I sort of think your 30's are when you have the most energy. I feel that in my 40's I might know my craft a little better and might be in a position to direct, but I might not have the same desire and energy to burn night after night. I'd like to direct one day, when acting is no longer enough and when I've learned more. But right now I just want to keep myself in a position where all the good parts I would want to play are offered to me. I'd like to be big box office all over the world, just so that I would get offered the roles and could pull people into the theater.''
Tom Stoppard's ''Real Thing'' has emerged as the biggest nonmusical box-office hit of the theater season, based on sales in the first two days after Thursday's opening. ''The Real Thing'' sold 6,543 tickets on Friday, bringing in $218,070, and on Saturday - normally a less lucrative day for selling theater tickets - the show sold 3,690 tickets for $122,500, according to Bernard Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, which is co-producer of the play. These figures do not include sales to brokers or to groups, Mr. Jacobs said.
Sales of better than $100,000 a day are considered strong for any nonmusical play and the figures for ''The Real Thing'' approach those that were reached by the musical ''Cats,'' which brought in approximately $250,000 on the first day after its opening, Mr. Jacobs said. But ''Cats'' had a higher scale than did ''The Real Thing,'' top seats of $45 versus $35 for the Stoppard play, and ''Cats'' sold less total tickets on its first day of full sales than did ''The Real Thing,'' he said.
''In my opinion, this many tickets have never been sold in one day,'' Mr. Jacobs said. But he acknowledged that it is impossible to confirm this because it is only in recent years that theaters have employed computer systems to accurately tally the amount of sales on a daily basis.
The ticket sales for ''The Real Thing,'' which is playing at the Plymouth Theater and stars Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, now extend into June, Mr. Jacobs said. The show is designed to break even with grosses of about $115,000 a week, and if business reaches capacity, the $800,000 investment in the show can be recouped in 20 to 23 weeks, Mr. Jacobs said.