Interview by Fiona Maddocks From The Guardian UK

The actor and director discusses Greek tragedy, geekdom, fatherhood and what he thinks of privately educated actors

You’re currently directing April de Angelis’s new play After Electra in Plymouth. Why this play?
I read it and said yes very quickly. The last play I directed was [Alan Plater’s] Close the Coalhouse Door, about the history of the mining unions. There was a lot of homework. April’s play has a complex backstory, but it’s really about what occurs in a room between people.

Explain its title: Electra in Greek mythology was the woman who plotted to murder her mother…
“After” Electra as in “drawn from”, and also “chasing after”. You’ll have to see it to understand why. You don’t need to know the Greek play to enjoy this one. It’s cathartic: we go to see Greek tragedy not to learn how to murder our mothers but to learn why it’s a bad idea. There’s a good line in the original Sophocles: “Dying is not the worst. Worst is when you want to die but cannot.” It’s about an artist, Virgie [Marty Cruikshank], who wants to take control of her life and her body, and her daughter Haydn [Veronica Roberts]. It’s a very black comedy, full of brilliant one-liners. It explores motherhood and the guilt of balancing duty to children with duty to one’s art. There aren’t many tabloid stories condemning men who go off to pursue careers leaving their children at home, but if a mother does that, she’s demonised. It’s as if a mother should have some bottomless well of goodness on which to draw, which somehow enables her to sacrifice her own ambitions.

And life isn’t always like that?
No. Even in the theatre, a fairly egalitarian place, most of the structures are in place for the convenience of men rather than women. Most theatres don’t have creches, for example. When Vicky Featherstone took over as artistic director of the Royal Court, she was asked what single thing would have helped in her career and she said “childcare”.

You know about this yourself. You grew up in a theatre family. Both your parents [Prunella Scales and Timothy West] were on the stage.
Yes, I know what it is to have parents working away from home, trying to earn a living, to be good to their children. I don’t blame them for any of that. I understand the pressure they were under. I was very struck by something April said the other day, about feeling disempowered when her daughter was young, wondering where all her feminist bravado had gone.

This all feeds into the play. You have a baby daughter…
I’m glad I’m directing the play after becoming a parent. During [my daughter’s] first six months I tried to be home as much as I could. I was lucky to be filming Mr Selfridge [for ITV] so I could stay in London, and solvent. And as Laura [Wade, his partner] is a writer, she was able to be down in Plymouth with our baby so I didn’t miss bath time. But I know it won’t always be straightforward, and I know everyone is struggling with these work-life challenges.

The play is about an elderly woman. It’s impossible not to think about your own mother, with whom you have worked so often…
It’s been emotional working on a play about an 84-year-old mother who is declining and wants to die, when my own mother, who is declining and has mild Alzheimer’s, wants nothing of the sort, yet finds her own ability to work – because she can no longer learn lines – impaired. I mustn’t generalise: as a family, our situation is much better than some others’. What I find most heartening is when I hear my mother read aloud, and find that she still has the most incredible gift for performing. Recently she did, very beautifully, a voiceover for an advert. It’s been winning awards. Radio producers, please take note.

You’re a busy tweeter. What is the appeal of Twitter?
It’s stimulating and useful. I can spread the word about what I’m up to, but I get back 10 times that via the various hubs I follow: articles, gigs, thoughts, jokes, puns, pictures. It’s great for journalism, activism, laughter. But the abuse problem is not being dealt with as well as it should. As a straight white male, I certainly see less of it, but I think we need to examine a society in which people hurl targeted abuse, especially towards women, under cover of anonymity. We have to fight it.

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You describe yourself as a geek. Explain!
Far too many interests for someone trying to have a career: board games, Dungeons and Dragons, astronomy, stamp collecting, chamber music. I’ve been an avid follower of Wimbledon Football Club (now AFC) since I was 13. And I used to be a trainspotter…

A trainspotter? You’re sounding nerdy rather than geeky. I imagine you’re quite easy to send up…
Certainly. I was quite proud of my trainspotting. How much do you want me to send myself up? [Laughter] As a child I remember a grownup I admired telling me that I had all the makings of the world’s worst pedant. It was a good warning. [More laughter.]

And birdwatching? When did that start?
Only about 10 years ago. I was running Sheffield Theatres and living to the west of the city, the first time I’d really lived in the country, having grown up in south London. It was a good antidote to a stressful job. I went out most mornings. As Iris Murdoch said, you can be walking along, painting the whole world with your thoughts and sorrows and then you see a kestrel, and suddenly the world is all kestrel, and you are released.

There’s a theme developing here…
As a slightly scared child, I had a cataloguing gene, a way of making a complex world more manageable. I still feel, as I tick off a new species, that I’m making some sort of “progress” – ridiculous. More deeply, I’ve come to believe that we aren’t born into this world, we grow out of it, like leaves. When you’re a child, you think the world started when you were born. When you have a child, you see that everything up to that point was a part of their creation. Birding is a way of plugging into that energy.

You are chair of the National Campaign for the Arts. What’s the biggest challenge?
Well, public funding for the arts has fallen further and faster than ever before. We’ve got into the habit of thinking that public spending is bad. There’s plenty of money; it’s just that too much of it is in the Cayman Islands. The arts spread joy and encourage empathy. They’re not a luxury. Ill-health, prejudice, extremism – all these can be helped by the arts. Affordable access should be part of a civilised country’s life. That means proper investment.

The shadow arts minister, Chris Bryant, asked the other day: “Where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons?” Where are you on the debate about privately educated actors?
I’ve got nothing against Eton. It produced George Orwell, and also some extremely talented actors; it’s quite right that they should be prominent. What concerns me is that we don’t seem to have enough non-public school actors working in classical theatre. We need those voices.

It seems you could have had a few other careers: politician, naturalist, physicist, canal boat navigator? You’re keen on music too.
I used to play the cello and I still play the piano. When my daughter was born I thought she should hear some Bach so I struggled through the Aria of the Goldberg Variations. It was the first music she heard.

Is she still keen on Bach?
She’s more into late-70s punk. Another addiction. I have a jukebox 80% full of singles from 1978 and 1979… Buzzcocks, Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees. And I’m a big Brian Eno fan. I played her By This River. Within three minutes she was asleep.

IMAGES:
Sam West ‘I was quite proud of my trainspotting’: Samuel West at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth. Photograph: Mark Passmore/ Apex
Samuel West: ‘We go to see Greek tragedy not to learn how to murder our mothers but to learn why it’s a bad idea.’ Photograph: Apex/Mark Passmore

For more on this story go to: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/22/sam-west-electra-april-de-angelis-prunella-scales-timothy-west