‘I have no idea what’s going on’

Henrietta Bredin talks to Jonathan Pryce about the difficulties he found with Athol Fugard’s Dimetos

It is the end of a long day of rehearsal and Jonathan Pryce is sitting patiently at a scrubbed wooden table strewn with water glasses and roughly carved dishes, behind him a tangle of ropes and pulleys slung from an overhead beam. He’s two-and-a-half weeks into the business of putting together a performance of Dimetos, an infrequently performed play by Athol Fugard, written in 1975.

‘It’s almost like doing a new play really. Sometimes when a play hasn’t had any major revivals you think, well, there must be a reason for that. But I think the only reason for this not being done more often is its apparent difficulty. When I first read it I could feel how beautifully written it was, but after one reading I couldn’t tell what it was about. I went to talk to Douglas Hodge — he’s directing — and I said, “I love this but I have no idea what’s going on.”