It was one of those weeks. On Monday, I was in four countries: I woke up at crack of dawn in Austria, took my first plane in Germany, my second in Switzerland, and was back in Blighty by lunch. The next day, I travelled up to Scotland to play the sodomitical Duke of Sandringham in the new historical blockbuster Outlander. Then I had a day off, so went from Glasgow to visit chums in Balquhidder, in Stirling, a village of 150 people, which has its own loch, snow-covered mountains, burbling rills, Highland steer, Rob Roy’s grave, and a sublime restaurant. Back to London a couple of days later, then off to Dublin at the weekend for the Irish Times Theatre Awards. And then, Monday again, I was back in the dear old West End to open Jonathan Bate’s Being Shakespeare at the Harold Pinter Theatre. I suppose this is how secretaries of state feel, or those Victorian bigamists with two entirely separate families — not so much a series of different places as a series of different lives. Not ‘where am I?’ but ‘who am I?’
The who-am-I factor is particularly strong at awards ceremonies. I was nominated for my performance in a one-man play newly commissioned for me by the Lyric in Belfast — the best new theatre, incidentally, I have ever seen, brilliantly conceived, designed and built on the banks of the Lagan. The play was about Jesus, and I wanted to do it in Northern Ireland, where God is still news. Matthew Hurt produced an extraordinary text, ingenious and passionate, in which I played 12 characters (including Mary, Judas, Pontius Pilate and the woman Christ cured from bleeding), which created a prismatic portrait of Jesus himself, seen from many angles.
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