James McArdle, Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Almeida Theatre
What has the journey been like to get back to theatres opening for you?
The journey to get back theatre for us has been unbelievable. You know this might have been two years in the making. I play Macbeth and Saoirse Ronan plays Lady Macbeth; we were supposed to be doing it in December 2020 and we’ve been planning it since late 2019. Then obviously Covid hit and it looked like it was all going to fall through, but we kept going and the director Yaël Farber, she was she was trapped in Iceland and then she was in Montreal and she was in Singapore and I was in Philadelphia and Glasgow – all in complete lockdown.
To try and keep the momentum going for this took real steel from from myself and Saoirse and Yaël and and Rupert Goold, who’s the artistic director, but we got there! We’ve had COVID cases during the rehearsals during performance… the antagonist in the room has been this little tiny virus that we are determined to not let defeat us.
How are you finding it being back now?
I’ve got to say, I didn’t realise how much I had missed it, but when I went out there to full audience, the sense of shared experience you could feel from the performance on stage and them. It feels like a triumph, it feels like a victory – just the fact that we’re all sitting cinemas together or theatres together or going to events together, it feels like there’s a sense that we’re not going to let it stop what makes us human and what our culture is.
What did you miss most about live performance?
There’s an immediacy to the feedback you get from an audience; it’s a shared experience. You can feel if something is happening in the room and there’s just something more visceral about that or more immediate about that than you get if you’re filming. You’re done, and then it’s on the telly and you or your performance becomes someone else’s; it becomes an editors or the directors. But theatre belongs to actors and writers and so you are sort of the editor of the evening.