Perhaps his doleful “hot priest” on “Fleabag” was first.
Soon afterward came his Hamlet, a character all but synonymous with melancholy. Next, in a streaming play called “Three Kings,” he was both an unloved son and his hollowed-out father.
Then, following the pandemic and in quick succession: a desperately lonely writer in the movie “All of Us Strangers” and that epicenter of sad, Uncle Vanya. Even so, one gloomy Chekhov character wasn’t enough for Andrew Scott, so he played them all.
And now? With a few weeks free before the November release of the movie “Elsinore” — in which he stars as an actor dying of AIDS while performing, yes, “Hamlet” — why not squeeze in a brief return to Simon Stephens’s “Sea Wall,” a portrait of unimaginable grief?
Naturally, Stephens wrote it for him.
I’m not sour-cherry-picking. Scott, having played all these roles in just the last 10 years — along with, admittedly, a few lighter and creepier ones — is surely his generation’s greatest tragedian.
And yet when I called him “a sadness machine” during an interview last week at Studio Seaview in Midtown Manhattan, where “Sea Wall” runs through Friday, he objected. He doesn’t see himself as sad, or at least no sadder than other people.
“It doesn’t end well for any of us,” he said with a smile and a shrug. “And yet here we are.”
Nor is the play, as the director Tina Satter, sitting near him, put it, “a trauma farm project.”
Tell that to my tear ducts.
Scott, who debuted the 35-minute monologue in 2008, taped it in 2012, then performed it onstage again in 2018, insisted that tragedy, like life, is never the whole story: “Where’s the loss if there wasn’t laughter?”
To him even Hamlet is “hilarious.”
Watching “Sea Wall” is a good way to see what he means and how he works. Key is the way his charm and, yes, that swoony Irish accent root the audience in a living moment of pleasure. At least at first.
So in playing a photographer named Alex, he carries himself with the eager ingratiation and self-deprecation of a best man at, say, an older brother’s wedding.
Alex is telling us the story of a family vacation to the south of France. In a few fleeting and seemingly autonomic gestures, he sculpts perfect renditions of the main characters from empty air.
His beloved wife, in a blue scoop-back dress: a dizzying goddess who melts his bones.
Their adorable daughter: her arms pawing skyward to be lifted onto a lap.
His father-in-law, a former soldier who later taught math: an impatient fusillade of finger snaps.
And the sea itself: a wobble that courses through his body like a fettuccine sine wave.
All these get laughs. So does a sardonic fist-pump when he describes himself and his wife as former socialists. Or when, knocked over by the sea, he becomes “the polar opposite of Daniel Craig,” flailing like a worm on a hook.
None of that business is indicated in Stephens’s spare script. And in the 2012 video, the movement and expression are entirely different. For Scott, the means of inhabitation of character are discovered in real time.
He is exceptionally invested in liveness. It’s part of why he keeps coming back to “Sea Wall.” Even more radically than in the 2019 New York version starring Tom Sturridge, the clutter between stage and audience has been removed. There’s no set, no curtain. He’s already there as audiences enter. He can see them as easily as they can see him.
With this production he is also exploring how that intense theatrical connection might also be cinematic. Satter is filming each performance — from both the stage and the bleachers — for a movie she and Scott hope will translate the play’s extreme directness and naturalism to film.
That counterintuitive idea is very Andrew Scott. Like any good actor, he dreams up ways to make sense of language and emotion, ways to physicalize a story. Walking down the street learning lines, he’ll ask himself: “How do you say that with as much seriousness and truth as possible? How do you really ask somebody a question?”
Then, it seems, he puts the answers aside and lets whatever happens happen.
How that process reliably creates deep sadness — and OK, deep joy — remains a great mystery.
When Stephens, who also adapted the one-man “Vanya,” first saw Scott perform — in Conor McPherson’s “Dublin Carol” at the Royal Court in 2000 — he could not believe that a 23-year-old standing still on a stage for a full minute “could hold an auditorium of a thousand people in his hand,” he said. “It felt like a magical alchemy.”
For Satter, it has something to do with the seduction of his voice, relaxing the listener into a state of openness to feeling.
For me, it is those things but also their lightning-speed application to shifting conditions on the ground: audience, text, self. He is to the story what a pipeline is to water, shaping and filtering it as it moves through him until it emerges pure.
You see that process at work in “Sea Wall,” as he organizes the spontaneities of speech and posture, of intellect and feeling, to graph with devastating precision a man’s slow descent from sunniness into despair.
His body clenches. His voice thickens. His eyes grow wet, but he does not weep. Remarkably, even his skin color changes, darkening from paper almost to purple.
To watch him is to watch live-action emotional ombré. By the end of the play, in anger and bereavement, furious with a God he does not believe in, he looks like an entirely different person, though you’ve barely clocked the change as it was happening.
“I’m holding my entire head together,” is an impossible line Stephens has given Alex to say. “The skin and the shell of me. I’m falling absolutely inside myself. But you can see that.”
And astonishingly you can.
The post What Makes Andrew Scott So Good at Tragedy? appeared first on New York Times.
