‘I have no idea what’s going on’

Henrietta Bredin talks to Jonathan Pryce about the difficulties he found with Athol Fugard’s Dimetos

It is the end of a long day of rehearsal and Jonathan Pryce is sitting patiently at a scrubbed wooden table strewn with water glasses and roughly carved dishes, behind him a tangle of ropes and pulleys slung from an overhead beam. He’s two-and-a-half weeks into the business of putting together a performance of Dimetos, an infrequently performed play by Athol Fugard, written in 1975.

‘It’s almost like doing a new play really. Sometimes when a play hasn’t had any major revivals you think, well, there must be a reason for that. But I think the only reason for this not being done more often is its apparent difficulty. When I first read it I could feel how beautifully written it was, but after one reading I couldn’t tell what it was about. I went to talk to Douglas Hodge — he’s directing — and I said, “I love this but I have no idea what’s going on.” I think he was rather shocked, as he’s been living with it for a while and has a very clear line on it. At any rate, that’s the whole point of rehearsing — we’re clarifying and discovering and, hopefully, illuminating the piece as we go along.’

When someone is as courteous and questingly intelligent as Pryce it’s hard to tell quite how much he must dislike talking to a complete stranger about this intensely private and exploratory process. Looking faintly surprised he says, ‘I don’t normally talk about how difficult plays are to do but with this one it’s unavoidable. Maybe it’s because I’m right in the middle of that process at the moment, up to my neck in it.