You wait for one dream role, then they all come along at once, North-East actor Jamie Parker tells Steve Pratt

ANYONE following Darlington-born actor Jamie Parker’s career would’ve been mystified by his appearance in the BBC2 drama series The Hour. He was seen being bloodily killed early in the opening scenes and you waited in vain to see him return (in flashback, of course, as he was dead) in the following five episodes.

As someone who’d been one of the original cast of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and made a movie with Tom Cruise, you expected more of him.

“That was it,” he says, squashing any idea that his role had been edited down. “I was the plot. That’s all there was. I was literally in the opening three minutes. That was just a few days’ work doing that sequence, but it was so technical with all the blood and stuff.”

More was seen of him in his most recent TV role in the BBC2 drama Parade’s End, but the theatre is where he’s really been making his mark in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead (with fellow Scarborough-born History Boy Samuel Barnett) and in one of the most celebrated Shakespearean roles, Henry V, at London’s Globe Theatre.

After spending three of the past four summers treading the boards at this replica of Shakespeare’s playhouse, he has a roof over his head and another dream role, playing Brick in Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer prize-winning drama Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Come the first day of rehearsal at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, he and co-star Zoe Boyle, who plays Maggie, were in costume for a publicity photo shoot. The picture with Maggie reclining in a bed while Brick, drink in hand, looks disinterested echoes the famous still from the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.

“It was pretty weird. I felt as if I was on Stars In Their Eyes,” he says.

“We did lots of different shots, but inevitably ended up pretty much recreating that picture.

It’s not intentionally a recreation but that’s the story – she’s clawing herself to bits on the bed and he’s not looking at her because he’s drinking. That’s the play.”

He knew the film but it’s really quite different to the play. Or plays as there are several published versions, including the original and the Broadway one. There’s also a 1974 edition which, says Parker, its author Tennessee Williams said was the definitive one. Director of the new production Sarah Esdaile has permission from the Williams Trust “to magpie from different versions if she sees fit”.

Inevitably, Newman’s shadow hangs over the role. “If ever there was a play to make you selfconscious about how you look,” says Parker at the mention of the movie star’s name.

BRICK Pollitt is a handsome, troubled exfootballer who drinks and is indifferent towards his wife Maggie. Matters come to a head as the family gathers to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy, the patriarch and owner of one the largest plantations in the Deep South.

“Williams said that the point of writing the play wasn’t to solve one man’s psychological problems. He’s trying to portray a family crisis and the intense, fiery lightning-like energy that gets battered around in those family crises.

“He famously didn’t like the film because it was trite and had pat conclusions and resolutions.

The play is not resolved. It’s wildly ambiguous.

It leaves people to fill in the gaps themselves.

Everyone is going to have a different experience from the person sitting next to them.”

He thinks you do like Maggie and Brick despite a long list of reasons not to. Williams called it the charm of the defeated. “It is self-indulgent and petulant and defeated and annoying and negative and glamorous. Very, very selfglamorising and all those things that should make you write them off but for all the annoyances, there’s something damned attractive about them. You get seduced by it. It’s a very enticing atmosphere of intoxication.”

It’s strange coming to play he’s always known and wanted to do. He had the same experience with Henry V. “I’ve wanted to do that since I was nine-years-old,” says Parker. “Not to wildly overdramatise it, there’s something inherently painful finally saying it out loud because you go, ‘that sounds awful, it sounded much better in my head’.”

WHAT’S interesting is coming back to a black box theatre in Leeds after the open-to-the-skies Globe Theatre. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, which is designed by Teesside -born Francis O’Connor, is going to look beautiful, he believes. “The set design is really gorgeous and the soundscape is going to be very full and complex and rich. It’s simpler at the Globe, but again, it’s about the audience filling in the gaps themselves and making their own leaps of imagination and deductions.”

Playing Henry was “very much a dream come true”, he says. “I ended up doing it with the people I wanted to do it with in the place I wanted to do it in. The director Dominic Dromgoole gave me my first job and I’ve graduated over the years working with him and that was the consolidation of that. I always saw oak boards and pillars and groundlings in my daydream. It was always that play, that tunic with the three lions and fleur de lys.”

There are other roles he’d like to play, but he doesn’t intend to name them. “I’m increasingly fatalistic about these things. If they’re supposed to, they’ll happen,” he says.

A musical would be good. His first season out of college he did The Gondoliers at Chichester, where he met his actress wife Deborah Crowe.

He doesn’t want to get pigeon-holed as a musical performer, believing that Roger Allam, who played Falstaff to his Hal, has got the balance right.

“He’s done several major musicals and won awards for them, but nobody would say Roger Allam is a musical theatre actor and that’s all he does. I would love to do some more musicals.

They’re just the hardest work and the best fun.

“But a lot of the best ones are done to death and a lot of the others I don’t really want to do.

I’m passionate about Sondheim, Adam Guettel, I love Rodgers and Hammerstein. If it happens, it happens.

Although Parker is working near his home town – his parents still live in Darlington – he’s had little time to explore old haunts. “I’m locked in the rehearsal room these days, I haven’t really poked my head out apart from lunch. It’s all-consuming really,” he says.

Home these days is in Hampshire with Deborah and their year-old son. “We moved out of town a few years ago, craving a little peace and quiet,” he says. “It’s just nice getting out of town – working in the craziness and then coming home to a slightly different craziness with a young son.”

  • Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, Oct 6-27. Box office: 0113-213-7700 and online wyp.org.uk