Ewan McGregor is telling us about his napkin trick: a foolproof way to block out annoying theatregoers in an instant. “I was watching a friend of mine on stage in New York and the lady next to me would not stop twirling her hair. I couldn’t f***ing concentrate! In the interval, I got two napkins, put holes in them, and fed them through the arms of my glasses so I had napkins on either side of my face.” McGregor, 54, places one hand on either side of his face to demonstrate, like a grinning horse with blinkers on. “The second half was perfect – couldn’t see her at all. They really should sell them at theatres.”
At this, his co-stars are in fits. Elizabeth Debicki, who played Princess Diana in the final two series of The Crown, and the Olivier-nominated Kate Fleetwood are no doubt imagining, as I am, the Trainspotting star at a Broadway show with tissues stuck to his face. “That woman must’ve thought you were hiding,” laughs Debicki. “Ewan McGregor thinks he’s so famous that he has to do the napkin trick.” Fleetwood hoots with laughter.
Such good-natured ribbing and easy warmth belie the fact that this trio met for the first time only six weeks ago in the rehearsal room for their new play, My Master Builder. “Now we’re all over each other all the time,” says the 52-year-old Fleetwood, pawing playfully at her castmates. “You get intimate so fast because you have to be vulnerable around each other, always failing in front of each other. It’s probably why people call us luvvies because it happens so quickly.”
It’s the fourth week of rehearsals, with only two more to go, and nerves are high. One after the other, Fleetwood, Debicki and McGregor had bundled into the dressing room backstage in various states of exhaustion, all dressed in the actor’s de facto uniform: nondescript trousers paired with a nondescript shirt, and in the case of McGregor, a nondescript cardigan and thick-rimmed spectacles.
“God, that was…” he huffs, sitting down. “Intense!” Fleetwood finishes. Debicki – the Australian actor who rose to fame in the UK with The Night Manager – appears to still be shaking off those last scenes, operating at a quiet remove for the first few minutes of conversation. It’s a tight space and they’re sitting together in a row, practically cheek to cheek. Debicki’s long arms (she’s 6ft 3in) drape over the back of McGregor’s chair and rest in Fleetwood’s lap, forming a connecting tissue between them all.
Every night of ‘Guys and Dolls’, I’d see a red light in the crowd and then another red light [filming me]
It’s McGregor’s first time on a London stage in 17 years. His last play was more than a decade ago in New York at the American Airlines theatre. (“It’s just not a good name for a theatre, is it? May as well be EasyJet theatre.”) There’s no real reason for his absence beyond life getting in the way. “The idea was to always do a play every five years. The first one I did was six or seven years after leaving drama school and I thought I’m never going to let it be that long again, but then I blew it.”
It’s been nearly a decade since Debicki, 34, acted on the stage, too. “I did The Crown for a while – and that took a big chunk – but, if I’m honest, there were some plays that’d come in every now and then, but screen stuff was taking priority, which I think naturally can happen.”
Fleetwood, meanwhile, is a fixture in the West End – along with her cheekbones, so sharp and high you could hang off them. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that she seems less tired than her co-stars, munching on biscuits and grapes with gusto. After all, she did close to 300 performances of Macbeth, for which her brutal, brilliant performance earned her a Tony nod. Suffice to say, Fleetwood knows a thing or two about dysfunctional stage marriages, which brings us to My Master Builder, the play we’re all here to discuss.
On that note, though, there is a lot that must be held back. In fact, all I have to go on is that theirs is a modern update of Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 drama The Master Builder, about an ageing architect whose fraught marriage is rocked by the sudden arrival of a young woman from his past who had… “Well, actually it’s not really an update,” McGregor interjects, leaving me with nothing to go on at all. I scramble and they laugh. There are shades of Ibsen’s play, they assure me.
Written by Lila Raicek and directed by Michael Grandage, My Master Builder is set in the present-day Hamptons where Henry (McGregor), an architect, is unveiling his latest masterpiece together with his wife Elena (Fleetwood) at a big Fourth of July bash, which is crashed by Mathilde (Debicki), a former fling and student of Henry’s. It’s a philosophical spelunking of sexual politics today.
“It gets into the muddy area in the middle of it all,” says McGregor. “Your memories might be different from my memories… I think everyone is going to feel different about it.” Fleetwood adds, “It’s the grey area that is so interesting and so politically on the money at the moment.” On its timeliness, Debicki quotes a line from the script: “The landscape has changed.”
In keeping with the times, Fleetwood’s Elena features more prominently and is a powerhouse in her own right – a publishing magnate not without sexual agency of her own. “I’m not just sitting on a rocking chair holding my doll,” says Fleetwood, in reference to Ibsen’s original matriarch. “And there’s more of the relationship between myself and Elizabeth’s character: what is the power dynamic between a woman and the woman who’s had an affair with her husband?”
The fact that it’s a new play is thrilling to them all. “There’s nothing more exciting than doing something for the first time – being the first person to play a role,” says McGregor, turning to his co-stars with schoolboy excitement, blue eyes glinting. “Every copy of this play ever to be published will have our names in it!”
As a play, it’s about as starry as it gets, keeping in step with the current, albeit controversial, trend for casting A-listers. This year alone, Cate Blanchett, Brie Larson, Rami Malek, Jonathan Bailey, Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell have lit up the West End with their star power. And it’s only April. At the mention of this, the three actors brace in unison like a three-headed frilled-neck lizard, its collar up and out.
“It bothers me that idea…” begins McGregor. “We’re all actors and there is this slight snobbery about if you’re famous for making films and then you do a play. We’ve all done theatre. We all come from theatre. So it’s not like stepping out of something to do something else for commercial reasons. It’s what we do. We’re actors, and if we’re lucky we get to work in theatre, and we get to work in television, and we get to work in films. It’s always been the case. Actors have always been in plays; that’s what actors do.”
“It’s not like you’ve done a blooming reality TV show or you’re some chef off the telly,” reasons Fleetwood. McGregor, who began working at the Perth Repertory Theatre at 16 and has worked with Grandage twice before in the mid-2000s, nods along. “That’s right or, you know, some…” He catches himself and grins at me. “Well, we probably shouldn’t mention any titles in case it sounds a little bitchy. But no, it’s not like that. I hope it’s not like that.”
There’s also the business of it all, adds Debicki. “I don’t know if this is the right or wrong thing to say, but Ewan coming onto the project lets us do this new play, lets the whole cast do this play. It allows the thing to exist. Instead of looking at it in any negative kind of light, I just think, well that’s fantastic because then more new work is getting put up. More theatre happens. More people get jobs.”
For certain fans, McGregor’s image as a sweaty heroin addict in Trainspotting or a Jedi master in Star Wars or an English poet infatuated with Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! may be indelible. A-list stars come with baggage – such is the price of iconic performances. “I don’t think of myself like that, and that’s not how I see the world,” McGregor says eventually. “I’ve been asked the same question for every play I’ve done. It’s not a new thing. There are always actors on stage and some people know that person and some people don’t. That’s just the way it goes.”
McGregor does, though, admit to there being a certain air at the beginning of any play he’s in these days. “You feel it from the audience for the first couple of minutes. They’re sort of like, ‘Well, come on then!’ but then you pull them into the play and then it’s gone.”
With the play’s specifics off limits, conversation deviates to napkin tricks and nightmare audiences. Like the time McGregor’s screening of Gravity was interrupted by someone very loudly chomping on nachos. Or when Fleetwood went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s opus Megalopolis in the cinema last year and had to contend with a couple getting busy in the seats behind her. (“Oh well that’s all right! That’s what the cinema is for,” laughs McGregor.)
All three agree that phones are the scourge of the theatre world. “The thing I’m most paranoid about is having my phone on,” says Debicki. “I switch it off and then I switch it back on to make sure that I switched it off.” And don’t get them started on people filming mid-performance… “Every night of Guys and Dolls, I’d see a red light in the crowd and then another red light,” says McGregor. “It drives me nuts!” Fleetwood exclaims.
All of a sudden, a voice over the loudspeaker is calling actors to the stage for the beginning of Act Two and I watch as panic floods the room. “No, it’s OK. That’s not for us!” Fleetwood exhales, grabbing hold of her co-stars as they dissolve into laughter at their own shared reaction. Marital dysfunction has never looked so fun.
‘My Master Builder’ runs from 17 April until 12 July at the Wyndham’s Theatre. Tickets are available here
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