INTERVIEW
Trevor Nunn, starring beside Caroline Quentin and Patricia Hodge. It started life on a mini- tour last year and, despite this talent-squelching line-up, the cast thought that a West End run was not happening. (‘Finding a West End slot is like finding a space in a supermarket car park. There’s one – oh no – Cameron Mackintosh has nipped in ahead of me.’) Bremner and Coward, both masters of the
aperçu, are a great match. ‘It’s a period sitcom,’ he says of the 1951 play, Coward’s meditation on the social upheaval that followed the Second World War. ‘It’s fascinating to be doing it at this time, when Downton Abbey is on TV and there is this extraordinarily nostalgic obsession for a world that is very different from ours, yet in some ways very similar.’ Lines learned, spare time is devoted to
translating an opera. Bremner has form here, having already reworked Carmen, Der Silbersee and Offenbach’s Orpheus (that was for Scottish Opera in 2011). He’s currently spending his free evenings with Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, written with Bertold Brecht in 1933. ‘I’m about six sins in,’ he says cheerily. ‘I’ve just finished Avarice and I’m moving onto Jealousy.’
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‘As the years go by I’m happier when I’m spending time in Scotland’
Then there is charity: he’s an ambassador
for Quarriers, fronting its Ryder Cup initiative to extend sports-style coaching to disadvan- taged youngsters. (And watching some golf.) Anything that takes him back to his home in the Borders is, he says, a bonus. ‘It’s the arc of life: having been born here,
Left: Rory Bremner on stage at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London.
I’m gradually working my way back. As the years go by I’m happier when I’m spending time in Scotland.’ He is almost dreamy. ‘Jump on the train at Kings Cross on a summer after- noon, get to Berwick on Tweed at 6pm, follow the Tweed inland from there, this is just God’s own country. The Cheviots are on the left, you follow the Tweed on your right, by the time you get to the Eildon hills and Melrose…’ The voice tails off. ‘When I was younger, I
thought scenery didn’t start till Perth. I was not interested in anything under 2,000ft.’ Adult- hood has mellowed this opinion. ‘The Borders, the hills there. Those huge skies.’ His aperçus have deserted him. Momentar-
ily. Then he is back to threaded-eyebrows Rory, heading off home to work on Jealousy and prepare for several weeks of Coward. Which one is the real Bremner? No idea.
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