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Dominic West on playing Edward Voysey

Actor Dominic West talks about getting inside the hero's mind.

Doubts and Uncertainties

There are certain challenges to playing Edward Voysey.

You start the play at an intense emotional pitch. The bottom has just fallen out of Edward's world. He's just discovered that the father he adores and respects is a fraud and a cheat. It's the horrible disappointment of the child when he first realises his parents are fallible. It reminds me of Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman but there are countless examples in drama. Few, however, start the play by walking on stage and bursting into tears. Barker wrote a similar high jump for a character I once acted in his play called Waste: walk on, crack up. It doesn't give the actor much to work off but it immediately kicks the play into gear.

What follows is the journey from innocence to experience; the journey many of us make from rebellion against our parents, to becoming just like them. Except that, unlike his father, Edward's integrity remains intact at the end of the play. His high moral stance emerges battered but uncompromised, and in losing his priggish hauteur, he gets the girl as well. Alice won't take him until he's lost some of his purity. So the damning inheritance becomes a blessing in disguise. Had Edward not had to 'face the music' he'd never have won Alice.

Edward's rectitude was a key problem for me initially, not having a great deal of it myself. His outrage at his father's crime is a professional as well as a personal one. Financial impropriety isn't really what gets my blood boiling. Nick Leeson or Enron don't excite the same visceral reaction that Gary Glitter does; even when one considers that people are 'beggared' by their greed. So I found it hard to feel the passion of Edward's professional indignance.

I talked to the Head of Finance at the National, and asked her if the crime Mr Voysey commits – speculating on a client's capital and pocketing the interest, while paying the client's ordinary rate of interest – would be considered a crime today. It seemed to me to be what banks do all the time. She said 'Absolutely, that's embezzlement. It's the worst thing someone in his position could do.' And I began to see, as Edward does, that poverty and social injustice begin with the subtle corruptions of 'nice' men like Mr Voysey.

I have wanted to work with Peter Gill for some time. He has an unusual degree of empathy for actors, probably because he used to be one. He also brings the skills of a writer and an incisive social commentator to bear. He has an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and a great skill in contextualising things: you ask a question about your character and you get a brilliant one-minute precis of the Franco-Prussian War. To my mind, he knows more about British theatre than anyone alive.