‘We were booed. I felt proud': Daniel Evans on his rollercoaster journey to RSC supremo

The Guardian

27-01-2025

Daniel Evans, whose sparkling performances in Stephen Sondheim musicals have earned him two Olivier awards and a Tony nomination, has been meaning to get back on stage for some time. Chalk up the delay to little things such as running Sheffield Theatres for seven years, followed by another seven at the Chichester Festival theatre before being appointed co-artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company with Tamara Harvey in 2023. Aside from a spot of emergency understudying on the RSC's queer musical western Cowbois, it has been 14 years since Evans acted on stage. Even during his award-laden early years, he would sometimes get home after a performance and think: 'Is this it?'
The 51-year-old sitting in the corner of a London rehearsal room today is singing a different tune. 'I had this need to act again,' Evans says. 'And I can't quite explain it.' He looks lean and taut, his head as smooth and shiny as a Belisha beacon. 'I started losing my hair in my early 20s. I've been shaving it since I was 25.' Wait: he definitely had a healthy mop when he played Peter Pan at the National in 1997 opposite Ian McKellen as Captain Hook. 'A wig,' he confides gently, as though breaking bad news to a delicate child.
That star-making turn came after the RSC had poached him during his final year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, whisking him off to New York for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now he is not only co-running the company but returning to acting as the king who insists on ruling alongside his male lover in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. There are some obvious differences between the RSC of his youth and now. Earlier this month, for instance, he was producing content for TikTok, to support £10 RSC tickets for 14-to-25-year-olds. 'Day one of rehearsals we were filming the trailer,' he says. 'Lots of snogging in the crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields.'
Forget TikTok: the last time Edward II was performed at the RSC, Ceefax was still around. (That was 35 years ago, with Simon Russell Beale.) Evans thinks its relative scarcity is attributable partly to what is known as 'Marlowe's mighty line'. The actor explains: 'It has this inexorable rhythm. Marlowe's thoughts are these trains that just keep going. To act that, you've got to be in a different state.' Agitated? 'Athletic.'
The question with any revival is always: why now? 'The play feels contemporary,' he reflects. 'However liberal our society may seem, you can encounter homophobia weekly, even daily. We've never had an out prime minister or an out Best Actor Oscar winner.' What about at close quarters? 'It can be in a look, or in how one experiences life backstage. You still hear directors say about an actor, 'Oh no, they're too camp for that part.''
It's one thing for Evans and Harvey to include Edward II as part of their flagship season. But for the RSC's co-artistic director to also take the lead role – and for that to mark Evans's return to the stage after an extended hiatus – places a substantial symbolic weight on the role itself.
In 2013, Evans noted that 'the most satisfying time I've had in the theatre is playing a gay part in a brilliant play'. He was referring to Christopher Shinn's Where Do We Live, back in 2002. What is the extra dimension for him in gay roles? 'It goes to the nature of acting itself. Very few people can totally efface themselves when they're acting, so for me it's a form of self-revelation. Choosing this part is about being all of me.' He looks faintly embarrassed. 'Sorry if that sounds strange!'
As well as being gay, he and Edward are both leaders. 'I think good leadership is about authenticity.' Another caveat: 'I know that's become a silly buzzword. But you have to ultimately be yourself. I wanted to play a role that allows me to reveal myself. Which sounds indulgent.' Why the apologetic tone? 'I have those doubts because I'm from the valleys in Wales and these are very different values from my upbringing. But those doubts are good because then you're reminding yourself, 'This isn't an ego trip. This is a play with something to say.''
Evans' sensitivity and his childhood love of theatre made him a doubly attractive target for bullies at school. 'People were calling me 'gay' before I knew I was. They spotted something in me that I didn't even see. My response was to run away from it. Then you can run no longer, so you have to face it.' He has been out for his professional life but the prospect of turning 50 nudged him toward Edward II. 'It's like, 'You've got to own this.''
Own it he will. He is going to be standing on stage, naked in some scenes, kissing another man – 'Two men!' he points out – in an avowedly queer play produced by an internationally renowned theatre company of which he is now joint artistic director. How much of that dream scenario represents a 'Screw you' to the bullies? 'Oh my God,' he says, banging a clenched fist against his chest. 'As you said that, I felt like I was being hit by something. I think you're right. I think that's what it is. That wasn't why we programmed the play but it links back to authenticity. It's saying, 'This is a part of who I am.''
There are other parallels. 'Edward is a king who couldn't be himself because of the bullying he experienced. Ironically, he gets in touch with his fury too late. He acts, yet not in a diplomatic way that can be construed as being good for the country. And he has to give up his crown.'
Evans' crown is safe for now. He and Harvey, who signed a five-year contract, are about to announce their new season. Before then, Evans will be acting again in a revival that, like his RSC gig, returns him to his theatrical roots. A new 25th anniversary production of Sarah Kane's harrowing 4:48 Psychosis, co-produced with the Royal Court, will reunite him with the other original cast members and their director James Macdonald. The Stratford chunk of the run will include a final performance beginning at 4:48am, after which the cast will have breakfast with the audience.
The mood during the original rehearsals of 4:48 Psychosis, which took place in the shadow of Kane's 1999 suicide, was febrile. 'There were days when we had to be sent home,' recalls Evans. 'Either we were laughing too much, which is a coping mechanism, or we were too emotionally tangled.'
Evans has long championed Kane's work; his Sheffield tenure even began in confrontational mode with a complete season of her writing. He also got to act alongside her when she replaced an injured cast member in the final three performances of her brutal 1998 play Cleansed (the one with the notorious stage direction: 'The rats carry Carl's feet away'). 'Sarah was on stage next to me. We were literally naked. It was disarming because she wasn't acting: she was being. Therefore, I had to change what I was doing to be more real. She had this rawness. It was as if her skin was translucent.'
With most of the run of 4:48 Psychosis sold out, including that dawn performance, the reception will be closer to reverence now, certainly compared with the outraged reviews at the time, which decried Kane's plays as filth. 'We were booed during the curtain call at Cleansed,' says Evans. 'I felt quite proud.'
Booing might be perversely gratifying but theatre has become a more hazardous and volatile place since the outbreak of the latest culture wars. Nataki Garrett, artistic director at the Oregon Shakespeare festival, received death threats; hostility greeted the Globe's Shakespeare and Race festival; while the same theatre faced a backlash over its non-binary characterisation of Joan of Arc in I, Joan.
Evans is committed to making the RSC a home for bold reimaginings, whether it's Emily Burns's Love's Labour's Lost, which relocated the hi-jinks to a tech bro's island, or Radiohead fusing with Shakespeare in the forthcoming Hamlet Hail to the Thief. But what is his relationship to controversy?
'In some ways, there is no avoiding it,' he says. 'People might disagree with one's vision, I guess. Every now and then, controversy may not be a bad thing as it means people are being asked to think differently. That said, shock can't be the only part. I do want to fuck with Shakespeare – but only to illuminate.'
Edward II is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 21 February to 5 April. 4:48 Psychosis is at the Royal Court, London, 12 June to 5 July and at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, 10 to 27 July.