PLAY SCHOOL GRADUATE
Philip Quast talks with Judith White in England, for The Sun Herald 28 May 1994
Philip Quast towered above a knot of customers in the doorway of the Covent Garden brasserie in the heart of London's theatreland. His tousled hair dyed jet black for his current role, a black coat over his shoulders, he wore sunglasses, despite the leaden skies.Like most Australian mums, I was used to seeing him bound around the set of ABC-TV's Play School, that paragon among preschool programs, like some eager, playful labrador.
The night before our meeting I had watched tapes of his riveting performance as The Minister in The Damnation of Harvey McHugh, a 12-part drama series on corruption and intrigue in the public service which begins on ABC-TV on Thursday. The Minister exudes authority - he's confident, scheming and ruthless. I no longer had a clue what the man behind the sunglasses would be like.
At 37, Quast is a man of many parts. He has succeeded in musicals, playing Inspector Javert in both the Sydney and London runs of Les Misérables and winning Britain's prestigious Olivier Award for his role in Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. Yet his true allegiance is to the classics. Which is what brings him back to London. No sooner had shooting finished on Harvey McHugh than he jumped on a plane to be in a zestful, controversial new production of George Bernard Shaw's 1924 play St Joan, directed by fellow Australian Gale Edwards. He plays a man half the age of The Minister - Joan's dashing young comrade-in-arms, Dunois, Bastard of Orleans.
Inside the cafe, Quast laid his sunglasses on the table, revealing a face unlike any of his characters. The features are mobile, the mood mercurial. He reached for black coffee and a cigarette and at once began answering questions thoughtfully and with disarming frankness. What attracts him about characters like Javert and The Minister? "I try to find the humanity in them. There is something likeable even about Iago," he said.
As he talked he ran his fingers through his hair, frequently staring at the table as he searched for the right words. He looked up almost diffidently to check that his point had been taken. "I've got a dark side myself," he said suddenly. "I think I'm a manic depressive, though I keep it at bay with work. I spent a lot of time alone as a child." He grew up on his parents' turkey farm near Tamworth, NSW. When he strides through a government abattoir as The Minister he's on home ground - but his view of the bush is far from rosy. "There was a lot of ploughing, shovelling manure, killing pigs. There was very little playtime," he said.
He never saw a theatre performance until he was 17. He trod the boards for the first time in school productions of Gilbert and Sullivan and went on to study drama at the University of New England and the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney.
Quast is quick to move away from the subject of his own childhood but at the drop of a hat he waxes eloquent about Play School and about his own children. He relaxes visibly, smiles a lot more. Few men, and very few actors, have so much of interest to say about childhood development.
The previous day his wife had arrived with the boys from their home in Redfern. A jet-lagged family was waiting to drive with him to north Wales, where St Joan had just opened. They were to share a farmhouse with six other male members of the cast. The ABC released Quast from his contract so he could play in St Joan. But as a presenter of 13 years standing he remains passionate about Play School.
"I feel politically devoted to Play School", he said. "I hope they never start tampering with it. It's kept going by the efforts of a very few people. The ABC makes a lot of money from it on the marketing side and not much of it gets ploughed back in. "We talk directly to the children, on their level. We make them feel like adults. They are encouraged to participate. And when you do a Play School concert and you see children spontaneously joining in and enjoying it, you know it's all worth it."
We managed to get back to how he prepares for his adult roles. "I'm not a method actor," he said emphatically. "When you study a role you go into yourself a lot. It can be very hard on the people you live with. In a way, what I do now is an extension of what you do as a teenager. You have the feeling of doing something alone. "I've become better at snapping in and out of it in the past four years, though, because of the kids. When I was younger I think I was hyped up all the time."
While he was preparing for Harvey McHugh, he read a lot about politicians and went to the Victorian Parliament to watch Premier Jeff Kennett. "Part of the fun for the audience is to see if they think The Minister is Paul Keating or Jeff Kennett or whoever. In fact he's every politician," said Quast. "It was a difficult role to act because a lot of the time he is lying. He has to be believed by the character he's talking to but not by the audience." There were other problems with the series. The original producer, Denny Lawrence, was replaced halfway through by Sue Masters and six episodes had to be re-shot.
All this left Quast's enthusiasm for the concept of the drama undimmed. "It's something new, something different for Australia. There is a classical element about the fate of The Minister. He is Faustus, Mephistopheles. This is where the series is bold. It deals with religion and that gives it a Shakespearean feel. That's where drama works best, with large-scale issues, not the small-scale, drawing room stuff." He spoke warmly about the rest of the cast. "None of us are big names but there are some very good, very experienced actors - people like Ronnie Falk and Monica Maughan." The title role of McHugh, the innocent young clerk who falls into The Minister's clutches, is played by newcomer Aaron Blabey. "He is brilliant - he has a tremendous future."
Quast thrives on the company of other actors, one reason why he's not keen to return to musicals for a while. "There are so many big egos around. And it's just exhausting. Eight shows a week, and you really have to be careful about sleep, careful about your voice- it brings out neuroses in people. "Stephen Sondheim told me it was elitist to say I was an actor first and foremost. But to me the words are more important. And when you work with other actors you learn from each other and you make good friends."
Last year with the Sydney Theatre Company he went straight from the musical Into Words to playing in Shakespeare's Coriolanus with his St Joan director Gale Edwards. "It was such a relief to be doing Shakespeare again. But there is a problem with the classics in Australia. Gale is one of the best, if not the best, stage directors in the country. It was a world-class production, yet it only ran for six weeks. It deserved to be far more widely seen." His present part in the Shaw production is "scarcely a career move". Dunois is not a major role.
"People ask me, as they ask Gale - why St Joan, why an English play, in England, with Oxbridge accents? "Well, it's not for fame, and it's certainly not for the money. Given the chance to live and work in another country, I think you take it. And without in any way going back to the cultural cringe, it's a fact that much of our culture comes from England. "This play is a challenge. It's a very bold, very physical production. It's not done in the drawing room way Shaw is usually done here." With Imogen Stubbs in the lead role, the play will tour England, Scotland and Wales before opening in London's West End.
And after St Joan? "Who knows. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none," he said with characteristic self-deprecation. Quast has been writing in recent years. He has unpublished stories and scripts set in the wilds of northern NSW where he grew up, and he has friends who'd love to produce them. "But it would take a lot of time to complete all that now, while I'm acting, and it's time I should be spending with my family.
"What I would like to do at some point in the future is to produce. During the making of Harvey McHugh I became quite interested in the problem-solving side of it all. I like to see the whole process of producing drama. Very few producers really understand actors. They tend to see them as a nuisance, as spoilt children who get in the way." For now, he will keep busy honing his own acting talents.
There are actors who get by on mimicry, mannerisms and disguise, some of them are very convincing, but the best actors, the true artists, transform themselves from the inside. Quast would be the last person to put himself up among the greats, but he has that capacity. And while he has an unworldly lack of ambition for fame and wealth, he cares greatly about the work he does.
"I have a bit of a problem back home at the moment," he said. "I'm not well enough known for some of the big parts, but I am experienced. I'm tending to get the difficult small parts that an inexperienced actor couldn't handle." In St Joan, his character waits by the River Loire for the wind to change in his army's favour. Finally it does. For Quast, the winds of fortune in Australia may begin to change with Harvey McHugh.
We stepped out on to Eliza Doolittle's cobbled forecourt, almost deserted in the half-drizzle. The shades went back on. Unusually for an actor, he hadn't put on a performance. He had let me see not only his passionate enthusiasms but the painful, self-searching, creative side of his work. A kind of extended adolescence, as he'd described it. Perhaps that's why the man who plays The Minister looks at times so young. We shook hands and he strode off to the London Underground as though he had miles of bush to cover. The boy from Tamworth has come a long way already.
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