The ObserverTheatreInterviewHarriet Walter: ‘Caring less what people think is a big thing for me’
Kate KellawayHarriet Walter’s new play, Boa, is an intimate dissection of love, ego and creative differences that sees her cast opposite her real-life husband, Guy Paul – but don’t mistake it for a self-portraitThe Guardian’s product and service reviews are independent and are in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. We will earn a commission from the retailer if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.
Walking along west London’s Uxbridge Road in the rain en route to meeting Harriet Walter – now Dame Harriet – and her new – or newish – American husband, Guy Paul, I reflect that this is an unlikely setting in which to discuss romance. Yet romance is what our meeting is to be about. Walter and Paul are to perform in a new play, a two-hander written by Clara Brennan, Boa, a portrait of a marriage – a two-hearter. But as I push into the Princess Victoria pub in the middle of the afternoon, the scene changes: there are unexpected rooms with chandeliers, marble fireplaces and vases of fat-stemmed, cochineal amaryllis. And upstairs, in a spacious rehearsal room, just around the corner from where Walter and Paul live, I find the couple waiting, like hosts readying themselves before a party.
Harriet Walter is familiar as one of our finest actors with an elegant, questing intensity and lightness of touch. She has played Hedda Gabler, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and, more recently, Julius Caesar and Henry IV in Phyllida Lloyd’s celebrated all-female Shakespeares. Guy Paul is an unknown quantity in the UK, although a regular on Broadway. But I know what he looks like in advance because of the play’s startling publicity shot in which a bare-chested Paul embraces Walter sideways on with a colossal boa constrictor casually draped around their necks as a living collar, a dappled fashion accessory. “Our co-star was named Bella, a trained snake, nine feet long,” smiles Paul. Walter recalls: “She weighed a hell of a lot. Your arms started to ache…” Paul elaborates: “She was all muscle but docile, very sweet.” Walter would, she admits, have run a mile were Bella’s skin not mercifully dry, were the snake-handlers not experienced, if Paul had not been there. “Will the world be disappointed there isn’t a real snake in the show?” Walter wonders.
We settle in a corner and Paul positions himself close by, inclining in Walter’s direction, one hand on her knee. She takes no notice of this whatsoever and calmly makes up her face as we talk (she has a reading to do later). The two are relaxed and make a striking pair: tall, angular, elegant. They seem to have an affinity of spirit, a shared intelligence that has seen it all (or much of it) before and a capacity for merriment. They met in 2009 on Broadway in the Tony-award-winning production of Mary Stuart, directed by Lloyd, which started life at the Donmar, in which Walter played Elizabeth I – consummate survivor. Walter herself has had to be something of a survivor too, following the tragic death in 2004 of her fiance, actor Peter Blythe, of lung cancer. With Paul’s blessing, she still wears his ring.
She was 60 when she and Paul tied the knot. And Paul reminisces about the beginning of their romance. He played “a small part – one of the courtiers” in Mary Stuart: “I was dancing attendance on the queen of England.” He took his duties overseriously? “Or frivolously,” he says with a laugh. I can see straight away that he thinks as he talks, there is nothing hackneyed or reflex about him. They describe a relationship that started “backstage and between scenes”, where every night, they could rely on seeing one another at exactly the same moment.
It has been their intention for some time to do a play together, in part, to get Paul better known here. They approached Hannah Price, assistant director on Lloyd’s Julius Caesar, and she set up a meeting with writer Brennan. One afternoon, about a year ago, they talked together about “life and death and marriage and love” and a month later Brennan had written a play. Walter recognised from “day one” there was enough to “bounce off it”. She explains: “It is about memory, about how two people remember differently, how we make a narrative out of our lives and how two professional people can live together – a relatively new thing. How do you make a relationship work when you both have ego and creative drive?”
She plays a dancer, nicknamed Boa, compelled to stop dancing because of a shoulder injury. Paul plays her husband, Louis, a former war reporter. “But don’t take this as a portrait of us,” Walter pleads. I won’t, I say. But would they humour me with a little experiment? Could they describe their opposite number’s character in the play and compare it with their own characters in life? They are game for the game. Paul starts: “Boa is a headstrong dancer who likes drink a little too much, a vibrant woman who goes off the rails and needs some help righting herself.” Walter, he proceeds, “does not have a weakness for drink, that is not one of her indulgences. Like Boa, she is an ambitious person and has had to deal with some of the same career crises (though not as extreme) and come through with flying colours. And Harriet, like Boa, has had to deal with losses. But Harriet is not a dancer…” Walter interrupts: “As will be made very clear…” “But,” Paul goes on, “she is a person with music and rhythm in her. She loves to dance, Harriet. Boa is described as a queen bee. I don’t think you would describe Harriet that way.”
Walter: “Definitely not.”
Paul: “But she’s certainly a bee.”
Walter: “In your bonnet?” Paul presses on: “And she has been a queen, played many queens…”
“And kings,” adds Walter.
Her turn to put Louis and Paul under the spotlight: “We know less about Louis. He has had a brilliant start but peaked early as a war reporter. When he was young, he experienced some horrible facts about the world. He is wise and extremely tolerant of Boa but need his privacy, locks himself away because his experiences are hard to share. This makes him frustrating to live with – at the same time, he has a vulnerability.”
She thinks Brennan has observed some similarities with Paul: “Americans come to Britain and see our eccentricities while being blind to their own [laughs]. Whereas I think Americans are pretty eccentric… Guy has a lot of the wisdom and patience Louis has…” “While the tape is running,” Paul laughs. Walter continues: “But what Louis doesn’t have is Guy’s energy, volatility, a crazy streak that is very good fun. I’ve just seen Guy playing Scrooge [a part he has been playing every winter for the past five years in Rochester, New York]. Physical comedy is a big thing of his which won’t come out in this play.”
Boa expresses feelings, Louis represses them. What do they each feel about the wisdom of bottling emotions up? “You have to take personal responsibility for which bits you repress,” says Walter. Paul adds: “And decide when is the time to share and when to shut up.” Walter expands: “You need to distinguish between getting something off your chest that won’t help anyone else or saying something because you know you will be hell to live with if you don’t. Quite often, this will be beyond your control. The cliche is that Americans express their emotions and the British don’t and that women express themselves and men don’t. I’m definitely an expresser, aren’t I? I’m an oversharer but selective about who I share with…”
Paul chips in: “One must be careful about sharing. Are you doing it for selfish reasons? Are you doing it to defend yourself and the devil take the consequences if anyone is hurt?” Walter says: “I’m suspicious of people who boast, ‘I tell it like it is.’” She sees editing emotions as “tricky” but sometimes necessary.
In the play, Louis falls in love with Boa on the scantiest of evidence: a sighting of her with a fag in mouth, partially dyed hair, impersonating a film star. And it is true that in life people do sometimes fall in love on a whim, through a snapshot sighting – or in the briefest of encounters. What is going on? Paul: “Pheromones?” Walter: “Recognition?” Paul: “A recognition you are not aware of?” Walter: “Some people like others who are like them, for others, opposites attract. Personally, I am drawn to differences.”
Walter is a champion of older women and far from accepting that they are “invisible”. She has spoken out against the demeaning pressure to look artificially young and said self-worth must not be found “at the end of a surgeon’s scalpel”. Her book of photographs, Facing It: Reflections on Images of Older Women, helped prove the point. Her own face, in which beauty and intelligence seem the same thing, confirms it too.
She talks about the challenge of having to play love at different ages in Boa: “Love is different at different stages of your life.” “That’s for sure,” says Paul. And I put them on the spot to see if they can single out things about being 60 or over that are improvements on being younger?
“Knowing what you don’t need,” Paul says. “As my dad said when he was about my age, you realise you don’t know everything and are not going to know everything and that’s OK.” Walter says: “Caring less about what people think is a big thing for me.” It is also easier to be clear about what matters. “Just as we were getting married,” Paul recalls, “we had job offers that would separate us for months. We’d only just started our lives together and decided we’d say no. Harriet has had a more important career than mine and more opportunities to say no – but it was an easy decision to make.” He adds: “Not that everyone has that luxury.”
Walter maintains: “This is one of the best times of my life. And I have only just recognised the importance of being moderately aware that my health is a priority and fitness.” Is horse-riding still an interest? “It is not so much part of my life now – you worry about accidents as you get older. And you don’t have to put yourself through things in the same way.” Yet they both feel at a point where, “we should do things now because it might not be possible later. You think life will go on for ever when you’re younger.”
Paul invigoratingly adds: “As you get older, you’re more comfortable with flux and changes. If there is a day when you can’t bear each other, you know it is just going to be that day. When you are young, you don’t have the patience – you bugger off.” The play talks about the importance of autonomy within a marriage. Does this matter? “In relationships,” Walter adds, “there is me and you – and this third character who is us. And if you separate, divorce or are parted, you have to pick up the ‘you’ that you were when alone. What gets negative is when people fix each other in a role.” Like typecasting? “Exactly – that’s the poison.”
The other poison, in this play, is alcohol. Have they witnessed relationships wrecked by drink? “Is there anyone who hasn’t had their life affected by someone with a drinking problem? It is in my family,” Paul replies. Walter chimes in: “And mine… we both have had it close to home.” Paul: “And we’ve seen people come out the other end which is encouraging.” Walter: “It is low self-esteem that lies behind it. But it is self-centred and deprives the other person of autonomy because they have to serve the demon that has come between them.”
As I am leaving, I ask if they think Boa might be the first of many double acts? They’d love it, they say, although Walter warns, as she gets up, that this is only “day one of rehearsals” and jokes that by the end of the run-up, they might be at each other’s throats. That is one thing I’ll bet won’t happen. It has been such an upbeat pleasure meeting them, I think, as I return – with a lighter tread – to the Uxbridge Road and the rain.
Boa is at the Trafalgar Studios, London SW1, from 5 February to 7 March
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