As Harry, known to millions as Viserys Targaryen from the first season of the HBO series Game of Thrones, says: “In some ways the fact that it is a world premiere adds to the pressure but in other ways it actually liberates you. We are the first people to do this and you cannot be thinking about what people have done before.
“And it’s also been very exciting to have Christopher in the rehearsal room especially as he is someone who lets you explore things and get on with things.
“He must be sitting on his hands so as not to go jumping in, but the great thing is that if you really get stuck you know that he is there and you know that you can speak to him but that he won’t get involved unless you are really bashing yourself against a wall!
“It an American play and it is a little bit scary getting your head around that but at the same time you realise that although it’s set at a specific moment in time, it is actually very resonant. It is set in America at this moment in its history just after Trump won the election but it goes beyond that.”
The wider context is the global shift in technology which contributed to Trump’s victory: “There is a beautiful passage where (Harry’s character) explains that, saying that every morning everybody reaches for their device where they key into an insubstantial world that is designed to create a profit. He is aware that something has shifted.
“And for Jim, the character that I play, it is all part and parcel of the real shift that we have seen. People have less of an attention span. You read half an interview and you have made up your mind. We’re so used to instant results and instant gratification now.”
All of which produces a crisis in Jim: “My character was the one person in Hillary Clinton’s Democratic election campaign that could see what was happening but was talked down. Hillary was surrounded by yes men so when Trump gets elected my character feels vindicated about what he was saying but also massively depressed. And also his marriage is breaking down and his whole life is in crisis.”
The play is Harry’s first since 2016. He should have been doing Dumb Waiter at the Hampstead Theatre in 2020 and in fact was just a couple days from opening in the show when the pandemic shut everything down.
“I never got to do it,” says Harry. And when the production did actually happen, later on without Harry in the cast, the new company didn’t get terribly long on the stage with it either before the latest lockdown locked them down again.
“That’s one of the reasons I was so keen to get back on the stage again. I don’t think I’ve ever done a play like this before. It’s a beautiful vehicle to discuss all the things that are going on.”
