Rush, Armfield reunite in theatre swansong
Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush will return to the Sydney stage next year in a tribute to his old friend, director Neil Armfield.
The pair have decided to revive the Russian classic Diary of a Madman as the final show of Armfield's 15-year reign as artistic director of Company B Belvoir at the end of next year.
Sitting on the stage of the modest Surry Hills theatre renowned for its avant garde productions, the actor and director laughed as they recalled some of the highlights of their 30-year collaboration.
Earlier this year, they were the toast of New York when Rush won a Tony Award for Armfield's play Exit the King, which started at Belvoir and went on to do huge business on Broadway.
"When Neil told me he was stepping down I thought, 'then I want to be part of the swansong, the blow off'. No, the blow out - the get out. Neil's personal bumpout!" Rush joked.
But staging the Gogol classic will be no laughing matter. It's a testing show that demands a lot of energy.
They hinted that they will modernise it but retain the classical integrity that saw the play win a swag of awards when it was produced 20 years ago.
"It was a creative milestone when we first did it in 1989," Rush said.
"Like opening a theatrical Pandora's box of bottomless, great, powerful classical ideas, because Gogol seems to have created the first modern loser anti-hero at the centre of what is a very classical tradition.
"And the fact that he's a failed clerk in the vast machinery of mindless bureaucracy of the 19th century in the early days of industrial revolution - anxious, nondescript, deluded - he could easily be a participant in the more sophisticated end of the reality TV show genre now."
The actor, who has been in demand by FileMaker's since he won an Academy Award in 1996 for his role in Shine, is relishing his return to the stage.
"Over the decades, there are maybe three or four parts that become distinctively yours or that you identify with," he said, referring to the play's central character of Prokoshin.
"And I thought it was worth pulling him out of the trunk again and seeing what life we could pump into him."
When Armfield was deciding on his final program, he returned to the play partly because Rush was prepared to come on board again and partly because the work has not been seen by two generations of theatre goers.
"Diary was in a sense a very iconic work for us. It was where we felt the full dynamic range of production and performance most strongly on this stage," he said.
"Somehow Diary broke some glass. It reached out to audiences."
In a coals to Newcastle scenario, they also toured the play to Russia, just weeks after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
"The fact was that we were doing it in front of a Russian audience who were quite dazzled by it," recalled Rush.
"They saw things in it that were way beyond their tradition. You know it's a part of their classical repertoire."
The play will be staged at Belvoir in December 2010 and the pair have not ruled out returning with the classic they dub The Loser's Hamlet to Broadway.