Mark Fisher catches up with Glasgow-born actor Douglas Henshall at large in London
Perhaps the first time I noticed the actor Douglas Henshall was in the Edinburgh Festival of 1989. He was playing Danny Noble, an ex-con trying to go straight in Iain Heggie's Clyde Nouveau, a black satire on an upwardly-mobile Glasgow. In Michael Boyd's Tron Theatre production, a crop-headed Henshall gave a masterly, intense, eye-popping performance, a perfect conduit for the stop-start fragmentation of the playwright's dialogue. He was clearly going somewhere. By that point the Glasgow-born actor had enjoyed a four-show run with 7:84 - in No Mean City, The Sash, Road and Nae Problem - and shown early signs of his versatility in a Belfast production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.
He would go on to put his blood-vessel bursting stamp on the Tron's startling staging of Ted Hughes's Crow, and as Gethin Price, the self-destructive novice stand-up in Comedians by Trevor Griffiths at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum. Like countless actors before him he took his bit-parts in film and TV - Taggart, Jute City, Silent Scream, The Big Man, and the rest - before pulling off the big one in Lipstick on Your Collar. As Corporal Berry, the bullying soldier seconded into a stuffy MoD office in Dennis Potter's tale of fantasy and violence in fifties London, Henshall made an all-important career leap. It seems daft even to draw attention to it, but for a Scottish actor to be cast as an Englishman requires the kind of mould-breaking thinking well beyond the vision of the average casting director. In crossing that barrier Henshall could be judged on his talents not his birth certificate. Four years on, Henshall is still conscious that the wrong accent can lose you a job. ''I never wanted to be a Scottish actor, I wanted just to be an actor,'' he says. ''There's a slight bias down here when you see certain people for work. You have to hit them over the head with the fact that you can do other accents. You have to work that bit harder. People who should know better make the same mistake. When I did Lipstick on your Collar, I suddenly got messages from people saying, 'I didn't know you could do this'. I'm an actor - of course I can do different accents!'' Unlike many ex-pats, Henshall has no hang-ups about settling in London. ''I'm not one of those people who comes away from Scotland and cries into their whisky every time they hear the bagpipes,'' he says. ''I'm perfectly happy to be a Scot living in England. If I want to go home, I can.'' He adds: ''It seemed to me to be a smart move. I got to the stage where I was paying that much money travelling up and down to London that it made sense to be here. It's never occurred to me that I could be letting anybody down,'' he laughs.
I caught up with the actor at London's Young Vic Theatre, where he is about to star as Teach, a small-time crook trying to organise a coin robbery in David Mamet's American Buffalo. For all the range of Henshall's post-Lipstick work, which included a three-play season with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995-96, and a role alongside Mark Rylance and Patsy Kensit in the A S Byatt movie Angels and Insects, he excels at the kind of frightening, self-possessed, unhinged characters in which Mamet - and in his turn, Iain Heggie - specialises. So is his first attempt at Mamet a sign that he's getting back to basics? ''I've always wanted to do anything by Mamet, because he's one of my favourite writers,'' says Henshall in a rehearsal break. ''One of the reasons I liked the way that Heggie wrote was because of that manic speed of thought, which is borrowed a wee bit from Mamet. To come here and get a chance to do that is brilliant, but I don't feel like I'm going back to anything.''
He'll play the part for a month or two, and then, as is the way of his profession, he'll see what work comes his way. Such uncertainty is something he thrives on, and he's fortunate in being able to exercise a degree of choice over the work he does. ''I'm drawn to things that look like they'll be interesting to do, that are going to stretch you,'' he says, conceding that money sometimes comes before love. ''I do stuff that is neither of those things, because I've got to pay the rent.'' One such earner is Kull the Conqueror, a sword-and-sorcery adventure, for which Henshall recently spent three months on location in Slovakia. ''They give all the leads to the Americans, then look out some British actors to play the baddies,'' he says about the movie, directed by Miami Vice's John Nicolella, featuring Harvey Fierstein, and Edward Tudor Pole, and lined up for an autumn release.
He says he enjoys film, television and theatre equally, and has no ambition to rush to Hollywood. What, then, are the chances of Henshall, who starred in the London productions of Simon Donald's Life of Stuff and Chris Hannan's Evil Doers, being seen back on home turf? ''I haven't been asked to work in Scotland for a while,'' he reflects, thinking back to his last Scottish role in the BBC's Down Among the Big Boys. ''But I've got no aversion to working anywhere . . .''
in American Buffalo is at the Young Vic, London, until April 5.
Mark Fisher The Herald - 18 Feb 1997