Jonathan Pryce reminisces with Laura Davis, ahead of his return to the Liverpool stage with The Caretaker

THERE are more salubrious places for one of Britain’s most celebrated actors to be hanging out than a dilapidated church hall in a shabby area of south London.

But there’s a bit of a Bohemian feel to the spot that The Everyman has chosen as rehearsal space for their much-anticipated production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker.

A waft of ale-scented breeze blows furtively through the sycamores from the half-timbered pub opposite, and fittingly theatrical is the nearby road, which displays the name Othello Close.

It is in the hall’s kitchen that I meet Jonathan Pryce, who, long before dueting with Madonna or dancing on the Broadway stage, began his acting career in Liverpool.

He looks surprisingly at home on his plastic chair, sipping tea from a thin-rimmed mug, unconcerned by the blistering peach paint or the ping of the microwave as other cast members pop in to heat up their lunch.

“I couldn’t have had a better start,” he says of his initial two years at the Everyman from early 1972. “You got to do a new play every five weeks or so, and we had a mix of new writing, often with a rock band on stage, something like a Willy Russell or a Bleasdale piece.

“But we also did classical theatre.”

At the time, the company was led by Alan Dosser.

“He had a great eye for finding new talent and new writing and ran a company very well so that it wasn’t all luvvy-duvvy – it sometimes could be quite a prickly place to work in,” reveals the Welsh-born actor, 62.

“He had a focus of plays for the community, for Liverpool, and he started that thing of going out to find an audience.

“Actors would go out to the pubs and clubs to put on short plays and entertainment. The idea was if people had seen a show in the pub they would come along to the Everyman.”

Pryce was studying at RADA, when he was asked to play the part of the Singer in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Dosser travelled down to London to check out his performance in the drama school’s end-of-year show and, despite leaving in the interval, offered him the part.

He then played Elbow in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and was in Richard III when Dosser decided to set it in a circus.

Lear was given a more straightforward treatment, except that, on the same days Pryce was performing as Edgar in the evenings, during the day the stage was transformed for the set of Winnie the Pooh.

Pryce, demonstrating the diversity of performance he would later become famous for, played Owl.

Antony Sher was The Fool by night and Christopher Robin by day.

“That was one of the few mistakes that Alan made,” laughs the father-of-three.