Rory Kinnear: Lost in a Good Book
Rory Kinnear appeared in Burnt by the Sun in the Lyttelton. Set during The Great Terror of 1936 Russia the play focuses on an idyllic summer in the country. Here he talks about Roald Dahl, reading by the fire in his rocking chair and making Ulysses accessible for toddlers.
I liked reading a lot from when I was about four. The first book that really transcended just reading was Roald Dahl's Boy, his autobiographical memoirs and then Going Solo, his teenage years. Because I'd read so many of his fictional stories then I discovered there was an adult behind it and that he could write his own life in as charming and engaging a way as his own fictitious imaginary way. I think his stories were quite venomous and that's children like. I did the Roald Dahl open day at the NT a few months ago and was reminded how he didn't patronise children in the slightest.
My favourite book
I ended up doing an English degree largely because of a teacher at my school. He got me into reading James Joyce and it had this sense of density and playfulness. I thought the study of it would prove to be really fun and rewarding so I did my thesis on Joyce. Ulysses is a book I enjoy reading a couple of pages of every few weeks and because I know the book quite well now, you know depending how much is in your left hand and how much is in your right, where you are. In a closer examination, a few pages at a time, there's always a new treat.
I was asked to read ten minutes from my favourite novel which I presumed to be a literary event in Hyde Park. When I turned up it was a posh fun fair at which there was a sort of literary tent but I arrived just as the previous act was finishing: a puppet show and the audience was exclusively four to five year olds. When I got up to read my excerpt of Ulysses I realised that I had perhaps misjudged the tenor of the event. I quickly thumbed through to a passage where Leopold Bloom is first introduced to us and we see his cat walk across the kitchen floor, which has various meows. I encouraged the already bored out of their minds children to meow along with me to make it interactive.
When I first read Burnt by the Sun
I first saw Burnt by the Sun before I read it and the film is very rolling; you get swept along and imperceptibly caught up in the drama. In the stage adaptation there's a sense of being in a period of time which is fascinating and terrifying. The emotional and interdependent complexities of this family and these lovers are universally engaging; that sense of what makes great drama: people in conflict and people put in extremes is very much specifically of 1936, but also something that people can relate to. In Russian drama the strength of the ensemble writing is fantastic and also the comic elements, such as Erdman's The Mandate. That sense of farce or absurdism has very beautifully elucidated emotional truth which I find always surprising and entertaining.
Reading around Russia
Certainly for Burnt by the Sun there's plenty to read about the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Purges. Orlando Figes is an exhaustive and fantastically engaging historian of the period. He's written many books on Russia including Natasha's Dance and A People's Tragedy which I read partly for Gorky's Philistines a couple of years ago. But that was set in 1905 so I had to fill in the next thirty years with another one of his works The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalinist Russia. Also Robert Conquest wrote a very meticulous, and at the time ground breaking piece of research work, called The Great Terror. There are plenty of books on the subject.
My favourite place to read
Holidays seem to be the time when there is a lack of guilt. I find when I'm in rehearsals for plays I find it very difficult to really switch off so I just enjoy reading about the subject of the play. I have a rocking chair in our sitting room which goes up against the fire and I feel very granddad like passing away a few hours reading.
Rory Kinnear is appearing in Burnt by the Sun in the Lyttelton until 21 May.
The playtext of Burnt by the Sun is available to buy from the NT Bookshop.
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