David Haig is one of those actors who can’t escape the visual identity of his characters. He’s the sad suburban salaryman. He’s the pasty-faced petty bureaucrat. He’s the bungling office curmudgeon with a volcanic temper. He just looks that way. Except that he doesn’t. I barely recognise the suntanned Bohemian figure who strolls up and shakes me by the hand. With his summery shirt and his trim grey beard he looks like a rakish Cretan sailor ready to pour himself a double ouzo and start reminiscing about the mermaids.
He’s rehearsing Lear, at the Theatre Royal Bath, when we meet. ‘It’s an addiction,’ he says. ‘Any actor, past a certain age, wants to do it. Everyone approaches it with the same caution and wariness because it’s such a vast and confused play. It’s got magnificent component parts but it very rarely works homogeneously as a whole.’
How is the director Lucy Bailey approaching it? ‘There is an idea,’ he says equivocally. ‘There is a concept. I think it’s a very brilliant one but I’m not going to say much about it. It’s a surprise.’ He then starts to narrow it down for me. ‘It’s not going to be set in the Elizabethan era, or indeed in a mythological British tribal era. I think it’ll be quite immediate.’
‘On a spaceship?’
‘Not a spaceship. Somewhere between the 11th century and the 25th century there is a little decade where we hopefully will locate it.’
He’s keen to bring his experience of parenthood to the role. ‘I’ve got five children and there’s a line, “reason not the need”, which is a quintessentially fatherly line.’ He adopts the tone of needling frustration familiar from his TV roles. ‘Don’t ask me why I want the hall cleared, just do it.
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