CityLife

Be Near Me shows Ian has write stuff

Ian McDiarmid

MOST of us will know Ian McDiarmid as a very fine actor and director.

He won an M.E.N. Theatre Award not long ago for his role in Pirandello’s Henry V, at The Lowry, and he recently directed and starred in Jonah And Otto, at the Royal Exchange studio.

But with the searing Be Near Me, coming to The Lowry on Tuesday, the Star Wars star (Palpatine) takes on a new role, that of writer as well as lead actor.

It’s an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed book and Ian was inspired to adapt it, he says because ‘quite simply, I loved Andrew’s book’.

He adds: “It struck me as inherently dramatic and I thought, ‘What a pity it’s not a play because that would be a wonderful part’.

“I like playing characters who are full of classic contradictions. I like having that relationship between the character and the audience. It’s almost a reason for being an actor in the theatre.”

It’s a compelling story about love, morality and regret, in which McDiarmid plays David Anderton, an Oxford-educated Catholic priest.

Assigned to a parish in a dispiriting Scottish town on the Ayrshire coast, he’s lonely and adrift and so finds himself befriending two unstable teenagers, from the local school, with tragic consequences.

Part of his attraction to the material, he suggests, was that Father David is himself an actor who ‘was performing his life rather than living it’.

“He had taken refuge in a role in the Church that maybe he really didn’t want to play but he’d been cast, or rather he’d cast himself, so he had to go through with it.”

McDiarmid championed the book wherever he could, until a friend encouraged him to have a go at writing an adaptation.

Hiding himself away at his retreat on the Scottish east coast, McDiarmid worked steadily for about two and a half months to produce a draft.

Then he contacted the National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany, who directed the M.E.N. Theatre Award-winning Black Watch.

A meeting was arranged and the project quickly began to take shape, although McDiarmid admits he panicked when, after the initial rehearsed readings, Tiffany made some suggestions for slight changes to the script, including scenes that weren’t in the novel.

“Because I knew the book so well, I had no problem about there being another scene – but how could I write it?”

Typically, the ideas started coming when he was on a train and had nothing to record them with. 

“I had to write it on scraps of paper. I even had to borrow a pen from someone. Then I did feel like a writer,” he laughs.

“When I could identify Be Near Me as a story about a man who’s having a battle with himself and the community, who are also having internal battles, I knew that was what the audience had to see.

“I’m not going to say this experience hasn’t given me the taste to write more, because it was a very exciting process, but it would have to be the right thing.

"I would have to feel like there was a play there to be uncovered. This is not, I hope, just a book that’s been adapted for the stage, it’s a play in its own right.”

Be Near Me is at The Lowry from Tuesday, April 28 until Saturday, May 2. £18 - £22. Call 0870 787 5780.