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Naked in the warehouse
Matt Wolf talks to Nicole Kidman, Sam Mendes and Iain Glen about their memories of The Blue Room, the headline-grabbing play that revived the Donmar Warehouse
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"It was a big risk for them," Nicole Kidman is saying, reflecting upon the decision of the Donmar Warehouse to mount her British stage debut in The Blue Room. "It could have been, 'What is Sam Mendes doing bringing this Australian actress over here?' Send her home."
Not bloody likely.
Few would cite David Hare's 1998 reworking of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde - a daisy-chain of sexual encounters - as the best production of the Mendes regime. Or the emotionally densest. Or - despite Kidman's celebrated flash of nudity - even the sexiest.
But there can be no doubt that The Blue Room has been the Donmar show to contain the most Mosts. No production here prompted more advance buzz, received more headline-making reviews - including Charles Spencer's immortal description in The Daily Telegraph of Kidman as "pure theatrical Viagra" - or did more to widen the theatre's profile.
The show was big box office and bigger news, and Mendes employs a highly dramatic image to sum up his experience of it. "Like the alien in the Ridley Scott movie, the play kind of lived inside the Donmar for a while, exploded out of its chest, left the theatre bleeding on a table somewhere gasping for breath and was gone.
"It kind of felt like The Blue Room fed off us," continues Mendes. "We gave birth to it, and it left us all trailing in its wake. Something happened that was not to do with theatre."
Kidman had wanted to do a play in London for some time and Mendes thought that The Blue Room - essentially a series of sketches in which one person couples with another who couples with yet another and so on until the circle closes - was absolutely right for her. The play was a two-hander, so both performers had to play five different characters: Kidman's were a young tart, an au pair, a married woman, a model and a grandly self-dramatising actress.
She first met her co-star, the British actor Iain Glen, at Mendes' Primrose Hill flat. "I was so shy I could hardly speak. I kept feeling like I was going to vomit: I had heard how brilliant Iain was on stage and he was formidable just as a person.
"I thought, I'm out of my league, but he really was so gentle and kind to me. He took my hand - not literally - and guided me through it, saying, 'Don't worry; I'm not going to let you fall.' "
The rehearsals were geared towards both vocal and physical demands, with Mendes introducing group massage into the rehearsal room because, reports Glen, "he wanted us to be physically more comfortable." Glen adds deadpan, "We rather enjoyed it." (Also enjoyable, the Tupperware sushi lunches from Nobu, proffered by Kidman, that became a midday staple.)
Kidman was busy allaying her demons: "I had absolute terror during the lead up to rehearsals. I was there the week before, starting to grapple with the accents and thinking, 'What am I doing? This is crazy.' Sam manages to keep you feeling very safe, and yet there I was feeling, 'This is madness,' and I got really frightened."
Glen recalls a rehearsal period "where we just flew with it very quickly" before hitting a brick wall. "We ground to a terrible halt round about the middle of rehearsals where Nicole and I lost faith.
"I think we thought there was a terrible danger that the play would just be Nicole and Iain kind of getting off with each other throughout an evening, and it would be very, very irritating for people. We weren't comfortable with it."
At the same time, faxes were arriving from Los Angeles on a scale that the Donmar - which had never previously employed an international film star - wasn't used to. In August, Kidman's LA publicist sent the theatre her Federal Express account number so that any items and autograph requests left for Kidman at the theatre could be sent on to America. Exceptions would be made for "very important people" (Richard Eyre and the Queen were cited by name) where it was OK "to approach Nicole directly".
The glimpse of flesh from Kidman in scene seven that would go on to become - in news terms - the global calling card of the production is easily overlooked on the page, where David Hare's stage directions read simply: the Model gets dressed.
Occurring nearly three-quarters of the way through the evening, the action requires the Model to follow a passionate kiss from the Playwright by standing up, back to the audience, and putting on her underwear while the Playwright helps with her top. A rueful exchange ensues about happiness, though one wonders how any in the audience heard it, having just witnessed what a salivating press clearly found unthinkable: Nicole Kidman in the flesh had appeared, well, in the flesh.
The director dismissed suggestions that the Model could dress under a sheet. Instead he told Kidman "probably the best thing to do is just stand up and pull on your knickers. I said, 'I guarantee you it will be very, very intimate and lit by the candles.'
"Nicole said fine, she would do it in the technical run-through, just before the dress rehearsal, but she didn't want to do it in the naked light of the rehearsal room; that would be a bit exposing."
Kidman remembers: "I was shy and kept going, 'Oh, I don't have the right underwear' - I always came up with some sort of excuse. Finally Sam just said, 'Nicole, here we go. I think it's very important; I don't think it's exploitative. It's totally character-driven.' "
(It no doubt helped that the black knickers were lent to the production by Kidman herself, along with some flesh-coloured G-strings that - the production notes made sure to point out - the performer 'sometimes wears home'.)
The act itself, reflects Kidman, "was a very sweet moment, and it was that simple. He dresses her, and it's sort of gentle when he puts her top on; she's like a little doll to him."
Glen remembers, as the performances approached, "We weren't thinking about anything beyond trying to do the best we could. I mean, for a lot of the rehearsal, we had been thinking we don't want to do this." The truth: "We had no expectation of it."
Kidman records a comparable panic. "I remember saying to Sam before we opened, 'I'm not going to be good; I'm not good, and I'm so terrified of letting you down.' " Hare then had his own concerns based on a dress rehearsal at which, he says, Kidman's inexperience - and nervousness - was all too plain to see.
It wasn't until a subsequent matinee that he changed his mind. "I couldn't believe anybody had learned so much in a week. I had never seen a faster learning curve."
On opening night, September 23, 1998, with only standing places left to sell, the theatre found itself housing not just a popular but a critical hit, justifying a £213,000 advance sale. Whatever reservations existed about the play - and there were plenty - these were swept aside in collective adoration of its leading lady.
The public simply couldn't get enough of her - as the Duke of Westminster, among others, learnt to his chagrin when he asked for house seats - places kept back by management for last minute VIP requests. There were none left. (His reply: "That's a bit rich, considering I own the land your theatre is on.")
"I was just so relieved," says Kidman, "because so much of being an actor is the fear of letting everybody else down." In critical terms, it seemed, Kidman was toughest on herself, as Richard Gere was among those to discover firsthand.
One night, Glen recalls, "Gere came backstage and said to Nicole, 'That was absolutely wonderful,' and she was saying, 'It wasn't; it was fucking awful,' and Richard joked and said, 'That's what I meant; it was fucking awful.' It just came out wrong." Glen's point: there were very performances Nicole would finish and think, 'That felt good.' She was hard on herself."
Whatever their puzzlement about that entire period, Kidman's collaborators point to her as the heroine of The Blue Room's not always pleasant elevation from mere production to phenomenon.
"I feel like for Nicole it was a very special time," says Mendes, citing the play as "the moment she became an entity quite separate from Tom Cruise - and I'm sure she was aware that was happening. It just turned people around to her and surprised them, and I'm very proud The Blue Room did that for her."
It was very specifically on the back of Hare's play that Kidman got both Moulin Rouge and The Hours (an adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel). Baz Luhrmann hired her for the former after attending the play's first Broadway preview, while director Stephen Daldry cast her as Virginia Woolf in the latter after admiring her as the Actress.
"It's amazing how little things lead to bigger things," says Kidman. "I basically credit Sam with the last few years of my career. The Blue Room basically changed my life."
- From Stepping into Freedom: Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse by Matt Wolf, published by Nick Hern Books on Nov 10. Call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222 to place an advance order.
- Iain Glen opens in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Lyttelton Theatre on Tuesday