Mark Strong on Arthur Miller, being an observer and the electricity of theatre

Mark Strong is back in the theatre with a West End revival of his super-charged stage performance in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge
Leading man: Mark Strong returned to the theatre for the first time in 12 years with last year's Young Vic production (Picture: Matt Writtle)
Liz Hoggard28 January 2015

Mark Strong’s big- and small-screen career was going very nicely, thank you. Then he landed his first stage role for 12 years, in the Young Vic’s radical revival of Arthur Miller’s 1955 play, A View from the Bridge — and it turned out to be his dream job. The show was a critical and commercial success and his performance as Brooklyn docker Eddie Carbone, obsessed with his 17-year-old niece, has put him in line for every award going (including a place on the Evening Standard Theatre Awards shortlist for Best Actor, and the Critics’ Circle Award, which he won yesterday). Now he’s set to do it all over again with the West End run.

Almost immediately, Strong says, he realised how much he’d missed the electricity of live performance. “I was getting a little jaded with the filming process, where you have very little control; you’re certainly not involved in the edit, so the film really isn’t yours. And with the advent of digital the process is becoming a lot more … messy. I’ve just done a film where one of the takes was 43 minutes long. They left the camera rolling and we just MADE STUFF up,” he winces, “which kind of makes me wonder what we have writers for. Because writing is the bedrock of it all. And Arthur Miller is one of the greatest.”

Strong, 51, actually worked briefly with Miller. He spent a week in a tiny room with the playwright (who died in 2005) when he played Biff in a 1996 National Theatre production of Death of a Salesman. Miller was chairing a conference in Salzburg and the actors went over to work with him. “Listening to him read Willy Loman and Biff is a privilege that I only now understand. Having his endorsement was such a great thing.”

At the time Strong hadn’t read A View from the Bridge. Sent the script last year, he devoured it in one sitting. “Miller manages to weave a spell with the characters and take you on a journey with the economy of his writing to a place you’re really not expecting,” he enthuses.

An electric performance: Strong, centre, with Phoebe Fox as Catherine, left, and Nicola Walker as Beatrice, right, in A View from the Bridge

The playwright once said that if there is an autobiographical character in any of his plays, it’s Eddie. And of course he married the young Marilyn Monroe a year after completing it. “That relationship between Eddie and the girl is uncannily well conceived and drawn,” Strong says. “Perhaps there is some resonance with his feelings for Marilyn in there.”

When he accepted the role, he knew that with avant-garde Belgian theatre-maker Ivo van Hove directing (also shortlisted for an Evening Standard theatre award), it wouldn’t be a conventional production. In the event it was more like an art installation. At the Young Vic, the in-the-round staging resembled a sunken grey box. The cast performed barefoot. “The only props: a chair, a cigar and a pair of heels,” Strong laughs. He loved how the “petri-dish of a set” brought out the Greek tragedy of the play. Unable to connect with his wife, Beatrice (played by a heart-breaking Nicola Walker), Eddie projects all his passion on to his niece, Catherine.

“The first 20 pages of the play are usually making a meal and then the Italian-American family sits down to eat. But if you get rid of that [as van Hove did] it just becomes about the words and what’s really going on. It’s like a slow-motion car crash, you can’t tear your eyes away.”

For the audience the incestuous overtones seem clear. But Strong insists that he and the young actress Phoebe Fox, as Catherine, play it as a totally innocent relationship. Eddie has brought Catherine up from a baby, and is horrified that she is getting engaged to the first man she has met.

“Phoebe is brilliantly cast because she can play that perfect cusp between girl and woman; so when she jumps on Eddie at the beginning, I as an actor can see her as a grown-up girl but you can always hear a sharp intake of breath from the audience because it’s completely inappropriate. The audience can see that, Beatrice can see that. But Eddie can’t; nor can Catherine, because they’ve been doing it for years. He adores this girl who means the world to him, and Eddie is great for her because she gets to practise this burgeoning sexuality in a safe environment. She loved cuddling and snuggling up to him just as much.”

Strong gets upset when people assume Eddie is a sexual predator. “Someone said to me the other day, ‘Well, he’s homophobic, misogynistic, he’s awful, isn’t he?’ But I don’t see it that way. He’s completely honourable but just misguided. It’s obvious to me that what this guy is trying to do is protect this girl. He’s made a promise to a dying woman that he will take care of her daughter, and he sees this boy [Rodolpho, the younger of his wife’s two cousins, illegal immigrants taking shelter, whom Catherine falls for] as a threat.”

On screen Strong can be terrifying, but in person he is lovely, genial company. He asks questions, and genuinely listens. You sense he is an observer — it’s no coincidence that he has played so many spies, from head of MI6 in The Imitation Game to Merlin, trainer of potential super-spies, in Matthew Vaughn’s new film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, out on Friday.

His quiet, intense side may be a legacy of his childhood. His Austrian mother and Italian father met in swinging London (his birth name is Marco Giuseppe Salussolia) but they separated after he was born. He was sent to a state-run home in Surrey for children from single-parent families. When his mother moved to Germany, he attended another state-run boarding school, in Norfolk.

It taught him independence. “I’m definitely a watcher, a magpie, a collector of the way people are. As an actor it’s doubly interesting because you can sometimes use things that you learn about people. I come from a tiny, tiny family. No brothers and sisters; so my world wasn’t one of an internal family environment. I was looking out.”

He studied acting at Bristol’s Old Vic theatre school and first came to public attention in BBC2’s Our Friends in the North (1996), where he played the loveable rogue Tosker alongside Daniel Craig, who is now godfather to his oldest son.

Suit up: In Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Strong plays a master spy

He credits theatre with launching his Hollywood career. In 2002 he was in Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya, Sam Mendes’s last season for the Donmar Warehouse, when it transferred to Broadway. All the key American casting directors saw it and he landed roles in Syriana, where he memorably ripped out George Clooney’s toenails, and Polanski’s Oliver Twist.

He met his wife, film producer Liza Marshall, when she cast him as gay gangster Harry Starks in the TV adaptation of Jake Arnott’s novel The Long Firm (2004). Today they live in Queen’s Park with their sons, Gabriel, 10, and Roman, seven.

Next we’ll see him in an American movie, Ad Inexplorata, about a one-man mission to Mars; then he and Sacha Baron Cohen play brothers separated at birth in the much anticipated Grimsby. “I’m a suave super-spy and Sacha’s the moron,” he deadpans.

But first there’s Miller. For the West End transfer some audience members will sit on stage, to recreate the intimacy of the original. It should be thrilling but messy. Every night the cast ends up drenched in blood-red rain. They have to queue to scrub it off in the shower, Strong reveals.

It’s all part of the “fine teamwork” and rhythm of theatre that he loves, he says. “It amazes me that in this day and age we’re still prepared to go into a room and switch the lights off and watch a group of people pretending to be other people. And that we can genuinely be transported.

“If the purpose of art is to take us out of our everyday lives of emails and bill-paying, then theatre is an amazing, slightly anachronistic thing that endures.”

A View from the Bridge is at Wyndham’s Theatre, WC2 (delfontmackintosh.co.uk), from February 11 to April 11

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