THE RENDITION MEETS ANTHONY WELSH
High school reunions often elicit a mix of dread and excitement, serving as a poignant reminder of how much can change over the years. In the lead-up to their 20 year reunion, a group of friends get together for a pre-reunion gathering, highlighting the diverse paths their lives have taken since their late teens. Some are married, others have children, and the rest are simply navigating the journey of life.
Set two years after a global pandemic that profoundly altered individual lives and societal dynamics, The Comeuppance, written by Branden Jacob-Jenkins and directed by Eric Ting, is described as “a play that is about us today.”
In our conversation with Anthony Welsh we discuss his return to stage, his role in his friendship group during his high school years, and the key messages he hopes the audience will glean from this play.
“Whenever I’m thinking about a character, I think about how I can relate to it and that might not be drastic or flamboyant, or obvious; but there’s a way in.”
QUESTION: The show is set in Autumn 2022, can you remember what you were doing at that time?
Anthony Welsh: I think I’d just got back from France. I went to France for a month after a TV show I did.
It was around the time where I think travelling restrictions were a bit looser, and so I went to the South and I studied French for a month, just to get away for a little bit and be by myself.
QUESTION: And how is your French now?
Anthony Welsh: Erm.. It’s okay. I’m probably just below conversational, I can understand enough.
QUESTION: In your own words, can you describe The Comeuppance to our audience?
Anthony Welsh: It’s always difficult to describe the entirety of a play briefly, but it’s about 5 friends who get together for a reunion. It’s their 20th reunion at high school, some of them haven’t seen each other in a long while, some of them still hang out and they decide to meet up before they go to the official reunion.
You just spend the night with them on the porch, and there is another visitor there who watches over the audience and also watches over the characters.
I think that's it, mysterious enough without saying too much.
QUESTION: When you first came across the script, how did you react to it? What were your initial thoughts?
Anthony Welsh: Okay so, there's two sides to it because I haven’t done a play in a few years and some of that was intentional, and some of it wasn’t. But, when they [the scripts] do come I’ve just tried to be very selective about which play I do.
So in some ways, I was trying not to like the script, because doing a play is a lot of work. It’s challenging, and it’s beautiful but I just don't deny the fact that it’s a lot of hard work. So if I’m going to do one, I’m going to give it my all and it has to be a project that I believe in so that I can do that. As I was reading it, I realised I was liking it and by the time I finished it, I was like this is a really good play.
I was trying not to like it, and realised that I loved it; and then I met the director Eric and the writer Branden and realised I really, really liked it and I felt compelled to do it. And I feel that's kind of the best way, it doesn't always work out that way, but if I feel compelled to play something - now I’m in, I’m fully in, 100%.
QUESTION: Like you said, you haven’t been on stage for a while, if our calculations are correct, it’s been 5 years since you’ve performed on stage.
Anthony Welsh: Yes, the last play I did was The Brothers Size at The Young Vic and The Barbershop Chronicles, and I did them back to back. So I was rehearsing for one whilst I was performing the other and so when I finished that I was like - I need a break!
That was part of the reason, but then the pandemic hit and everything sort of slowed down from there so it’s been a while since I’ve been on stage. It’s the longest time I’ve ever not been on stage, so there's excitement and a bit of nerves about that.
QUESTION: Based on that, how does it feel to be back and alongside that, what does theatre mean to you?
Anthony Welsh: I was talking to my friend about this the other day and I was saying, being back in a rehearsal room like this is so refreshing and it’s how I started. It was my introduction into the world of acting, I didn’t go on screen for years. The first thing I did was stage work.
Secondly, before time, we’ve been telling stories and we’ve been telling stories live in the flesh. We’ve been telling stories to each other; in tribes, in compounds, in villages. We’ve been putting on shows and stories for a millennia, and I think it's one of the beautiful things about theatre and I don’t think it will ever die out. There is a need for it clearly because we’ve been doing it for so long, I think it will continue. Even if the film industry has a strike, or there are problems in that sector I think we will always have (the) stage.
Being back in a rehearsal room was a lovely reminder as to why, because it is so detailed and we’re talking about intricacies of life and characters and personalities and reasons - we’re constantly asking why why why why, it’s like an interrogation of why people do things, or why people don’t do things.
And also, it’s challenging. I don’t go to work and feel like I’ve got this. I go to work thinking okay, I’ve got to climb this mountain a little more, I’ve got to climb this mountain a little bit more - and will I make it? There’s a lovely test in that.
QUESTION: You mentioned that theatre is challenging. What is it about theatre that makes it so challenging, especially compared to being on screen?
Anthony Welsh: Ermm.. because mistakes are real and what’s fascinating about seeing a mistake is the recovery. How do you recover from this mistake, and the audience doesn't know there was a mistake? Getting back into that mindset where you can’t just do another take or say I’ll fix it in post (production). It’s like, no, we’re doing this from the beginning to end, 2 hours straight through, and we’re going to get it as right as possible (even) if there's any mistakes. That’s actually what makes it really exciting. That is a scary thing to deal with because I don’t want to make any mistakes, you know. That might happen or likely will happen, but how do we recover from it? How do we continue? That's part of the challenge.
The other part of the challenge is you’ve got a lot of eyes on you, and how do you act natural when you’ve got 3, 400 people watching you? How do you reflect parts of yourself, parts of the audience self in a very naturalistic way, in a very unnaturalistic environment - that probably applies to screen as well, but those are the challenges.
“I always want people to feel something when they watch my work, but there’s also a part of me that goes - hey, I like this. I like this work. I’m lending myself, and talents to it, because I enjoy it. I want to have as best of an experience as I can with this company, and try to be honest and truthful in the telling of his character, and that’s almost all I can do. So no matter the response, no matter the reviews, I need to hold on to that”
QUESTION: With most friendship groups that were formed in school, each person tends to take on a role. Did you play a role in your high school friendship group?
Anthony Welsh: You're right, I think we all play roles even if we’re not aware of them at the time. What's really great about this play is everyone did have their role and they are coming back 20 years later. There’s a reassessment of what that role was and a reassessment of what the other characters' roles were, you know. It’s almost like some of them are trying to put you back into that role because that’s what they are comfortable with. But maybe you’ve grown, maybe you've moved on, or maybe you haven't - but you want to prove that you've moved on - and so there is that tension.
There’s definite roles in The Comeuppance and we spoke about that a lot between our characters, and the boxes we’re trying to put each other in that don't fit anymore.
For myself, I was kind of… I was with the athletes, I was very athletic, but I was also cool with the boffins, as you know - we called them back then, cause I was a boffin myself, but a shy one.
I managed to strike quite a good balance between hanging out with the “not so cool kids” and then the “cool kids”. I didn’t get into too much trouble, I was going to class and really interested in trigonometry, trying to beat my friends in as many questions as possible.
QUESTION: It sounds like you didn’t feel like you had to be boxed in, the fact that you managed two groups in itself is something…
Anthony Welsh: I mean, I will say that it was kind of secretive. So I would hang out with the kids that weren't so cool because I got on with them really well and we had a good time, but I didn’t necessarily let everyone know about that - because I’m one of the cool kids - so it was like a box I feel like I had to present as, at least for a while.
QUESTION: Have your personal experiences informed the character you are portraying in any way?
Anthony Welsh: I think it has.
We’re talking about who we were in high school and it’s an American school system so it's different, it really is different. But, there's still a relation, because we're all humans, you know, in all parts of the world, we all have similar things, similar themes that we feel.
For the first few weeks of rehearsal, we would sit and talk with each other about our experiences at school and like, what it felt like to be embarrassed, you know, what it felt like they have a secret, what it felt like to have one person find out that secret, or maybe the whole school. And so I think that's always part of our job. In some ways, it relates quite well in this play, because we're talking about school.
QUESTION: How would you describe the core themes of this play?
Anthony Welsh: I’m taking this (statement) from Eric our director, ‘what are you running away from and what are you running towards’. We thought a lot about that.
What past version of yourself did you like or did you not like, and what are you trying to create now?
When you see the play, there's a lot of like, “I'm pretty sure I remember, didn't we use to, remember when…”
There's a lot of that going on in the play, you know. And then there's people going, “no, it was this” and then you're questioning your own memory. And it's that sort of tension because you're like, well, no. The way I computed things was like this, and the way you've computed it is like this, but who's wrong, who's right, or maybe we're both right? Or we're both wrong.
There's a theme in there somewhere, but that was my elaborate way of explaining.
QUESTION: Based on the themes you’ve shared, how do you think this American transfer is going to resonate with the current UK audience and context, and do you think the team will need to make adjustments?
Anthony Welsh: I mean, this is the question, how are the audience gonna react? I don't think I can answer, I don't know. I'm curious, really curious to see how they react, and also didn't get to see how the American audience reacted to that production.
So look, a lot of the things that we're talking about in the play, are intimately connected to an American audience, like they lived through these things, right? Whereas we have a relationship to it, but we're not intimately connected in the same way. So the reaction, I'm sure will be different, But hopefully, nonetheless felt, it will still be felt in a way. So I'm as curious as you are, I'd love to know.
We are still making adjustments, there's, like, small, but sort of large things that we're moving around. We just got into the theatre yesterday and, you know, there's already adjustments being made that's not audience related. That's just, you know, being in the space related.
There's something I can't reveal now, but it's something that ties in directly to your question about how a British audience will react to it because Eric is aware of that. He's deciding on whether we do certain things to make it bring the audience slightly closer to us.
So yeah, I'm fascinated.
I also think you have to have an awareness about who your audience might be. Whether that means you cater to them, or you, or you challenge them still, it's still up to you, right, but an awareness is, I think, necessary. Then there's also the other thing, in response to your question about reactions, it’s like, there is that part of me that's always curious about how an audience will react, and hopefully they like it, or to enjoy it, hopefully they feel something.
This quote is quite well known, but an actor once told me that, if you believe the good stuff they say about you have to believe the bad stuff. And if that's the case, then maybe the best thing is to just not believe and just keep striving to be better at each level.
QUESTION: When you say ‘feel something’, what does that mean and look like?
Anthony Welsh: For me it means when I see something honest. I might not like what I saw, it might make me feel disturbed.I might feel troubled, I might feel sad, but it made me feel something. I think art in general should do that. So the best work I've seen might not be technically superior, it might not have all the bells and whistles, but there's heart in it, and I think that's the most important thing. You've got heart and you build around the heart, then you're onto a winner.
The productions that are most memorable to me, sometimes they're the glitzy stuff - sometimes. But really, it's about what it made me feel when I left. Sometimes I don't want to speak to anyone when I leave the theatre, because I'm sitting in whatever I felt and I don't want to intellectualise it afterwards.
I just want to be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I feel this way, you know.
QUESTION: In an interview Eric Ting said that we should “be prepared to watch a play that is about us today”. One of the great things about the comeuppance is that it’s a contemporary play, and we don’t always get that in theatre. What do you think will resonate most with contemporary audiences?
Anthony Welsh: It’s one of the first post-pandemic plays I’ve read. So for my generation and even the generation slightly younger, and older - there's just going to be a lot of relation to. Their own relation to.
The recentness of this play, and the events that were talked about in this play and watching a group of friends that have grown up through these events, that have bookmarked parts of their lives; we’ll be able to relate to.
Even if you’re not a political person, even if you’re not someone who's caught up in it - these massive events, 9/11, the pandemic - they ripple and they have an effect. Sometimes they get passed into laws and legislations and the rights and freedoms or the lack of are a consequence of certain events happening.
When we have these big events they affect our lives in ways we don't even realise. This generation are affected by things that aren't necessarily in their control of, or even realise. That’s the interesting thing about this play.
There is something about this high school reunion that we are eager to witness. The Comeuppance poses as a play that will challenge our perceptions and memory, whilst igniting a sense of nostalgia all within a 2-hour time frame. A play about us - today.
The Comeuppance will be showing at Almeida Theatre until 18th May 2024.
