Interview: David Haig on King Lear and The Wright Way

David Haig is one of those actors who can’t escape the visual identity of his characters. He’s the sad suburban salaryman. He’s the pasty-faced petty bureaucrat. He’s the bungling office curmudgeon with a volcanic temper. He just looks that way. Except that he doesn’t. I barely recognise the suntanned Bohemian figure who strolls up and shakes me by the hand. With his summery shirt and his trim grey beard he looks like a rakish Cretan sailor ready to pour himself a double ouzo and start reminiscing about the mermaids.

He’s rehearsing Lear, at the Theatre Royal Bath, when we meet. ‘It’s an addiction,’ he says. ‘Any actor, past a certain age, wants to do it. Everyone approaches it with the same caution and wariness because it’s such a vast and confused play. It’s got magnificent component parts but it very rarely works homogeneously as a whole.’

How is the director Lucy Bailey approaching it? ‘There is an idea,’ he says equivocally.