Damien Molony on the Length of His Sideburns & the Thrill of Working with Stewart & McKellen in London's No Man's Land

The fall theater season in London gets off to a starry start with the opening at Wyndham’s Theatre of No Man’s Land, the 1975 Harold Pinter play starring the actor-knights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, who played the same roles on Broadway in 2013. Joining them this time around are 1997 Tony winner Owen Teale and the fast-rising Irish actor Damien Molony. The youngest of the cast, Molony took time during a pre-London run of the show in Cardiff, Wales, to talk about acting Pinter’s famous pauses and sharing the stage with two titanic talents.

How does it feel to open No Man’s Land at the same West End playhouse, Wyndham’s, where the first production ran in 1975?
It’s also the very first play I went to see when I was training at drama school in London was Derek Jacobi in Twelfth Night at Wyndham’s. I remember sitting so high up in the balcony that I thought I was going to faint. So to be appearing on that same stage now is “pinch yourself” kind of stuff.

And with these actors, McKellen and Stewart, both of whom are major figures in their own right.
What’s so wonderful about their relationship, and also their relationship with Sean [Mathias, the director], is the huge amount of respect they have for the other’s achievements and their warmth. They come across as great friends, which they are, but they’re also so supportive of one another, which in turn has been so inspiring to me.

Were you nervous about joining their ranks?
Sure, here I was a young actor on day one new to the production and also pretty much to [the work of] Pinter, but both of them gave me a big hug and a huge welcome, which suddenly made me feel as if I was one of them. I will be forever grateful for that, and if I’m ever in that position myself with a young actor, I hope to be able to give that person something of what I have learned from Ian and Patrick.

The offer to join the production must have been irresistible.
Oh, it was! An email came into my inbox saying that the production had these people in it and that there was going to be a four-week tour followed by three and a half months in the West End, and I just said, “When is the meeting?” So we read it, and I got the job and then had two and a half months to try and get myself up to a level that everyone else would be at on the first day of rehearsals.

How did you manage that?
I bought all of Pinter’s collected works and began working my way through the other plays: the biography of him by Michael Billington hasn’t left my side for four or five months! I also saw the Jamie Lloyd production of The Homecoming and slowly but surely began getting an idea of what his work is about.

You must have come across Pinter’s writing before.
We had a class at drama school about the power of silence, and I remember the teacher giving us a section from [Pinter’s 1960 masterwork] The Caretaker. I’m not sure I knew what was happening at the time, but I think I now understand what those pauses and silences mean: they are filled with such menace and doubt and fear and anger.

There’s comedy in No Man’s Land, too.
Very much so. You can see elements here of some of his revue sketches, which were so filthy and so funny. That’s what is so great about No Man’s Land: it’s got all of Pinter in two hours—that deep, deep sadness and also laugh-out-loud jokes, total sketch stuff and yet real menace between Foster and Briggs.

You play Foster, who, along with Briggs, is in the employ of the Patrick Stewart character, Hirst, even as you both try to intimidate the Ian McKellen character, Spooner.
I think of Foster and Briggs as desperate to survive. They have a wonderful life in this house, or what they believe to be a wonderful life, and with the arrival of Ian as Spooner, all that is suddenly under threat, so what happens is Foster and Briggs want to get rid of that threat; their comfort zone is punctured.

On Broadway, this production ran in 2013 in repertory with Stewart and McKellen in Waiting for Godot, a play they have already done on the West End.
Where I saw it! I was studying at the time and I remember the gasp in the audience when the curtain went up and the glee that I felt watching them. Yesterday, while on tour, I was watching people get off the bus in Cardiff [Wales] and they were all dressed up and there was this wonderful sense of excitement among us as actors. There’s something really thrilling about playing off the audience as if they were the fifth character in the play.

And presumably audiences needn’t worry about whether they get the play: instead, they should just relax into it.
The thing with Pinter and No Man’s Land in particular is that everyone is going to take something different from it. We had one woman who couldn’t take her eyes off Patrick because her own father had dementia and so for her it was a play about memory, whereas there are others who can’t stop laughing at what to them is a hilarious conversation between two drunks in Hampstead Heath. You begin to understand the unsaid in every line, in every moment.

As an Irishman who grew up away from the rough-and-tumble East End where Pinter was born and raised, are you having to adjust to the language of the play?
Certainly a Bethnal Green boy from east London is going to have a whole different speech rhythm to someone who grew up in Kildare, but I’ve been listening to Harold speaking and to videos of people in the East End in the 1970s. It’s also about how long the men at that time wore their sideburns and what their hair was like.

So how long are your sideburns?
They are so long! My trainer shouted at me a few weeks ago, “What is that on your face?” But, you know, to get to play onstage with Owen and Ian and Patrick, I’d have them this long for the rest of my life.