Timothy Dalton is back on stage this week with `His Dark Materials` after a 15-year hiatus (pictures)

Timothy Dalton is back in a tale that’s more fantastical than any Bond film (even "Die Another Day"!). The Sunday Times has reported on the team bringing His Dark Materials to the National Theatre.



Witches, harpies, armoured bears, cliff-ghasts and a snow leopard are called for an afternoon rehearsal, announces a notice at the National Theatre’s stage door. Such fantastical oddities have become the norm this autumn on the south bank of the Thames, where, for the past three months, one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by the company has been in preparation. This Thursday, Timothy Dalton, Patricia Hodge and Niamh Cusack will lead the first preview performance of Nicholas Wright’s two-part adaptation of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy.



The family Christmas show arrives with high expectations, not least from the legions of young (and adult) readers who take a proprietorial interest in how Pullman’s pungent, vivid epic of the imagination might be actualised. There are expectations, too, of the stellar team putting it on. The project to stage Pullman’s controversial moral mythology, described by its creator as "Milton’s Paradise Lost in three volumes" (though in his, many say heretical, version, paradise is only regained after the death of a decrepit, corrupt God), has had a long genesis. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with Pullman’s agent, so the National bought the rights to stage the trilogy just as the hype surrounding them was reaching a crescendo, with the 57-year-old former teacher winning the Whitbread prize.



Ask anyone involved to say what on their curriculum vitae compares with this production and the responses are varied. Some are momentarily dumbstruck, others giggle nervously. The loquacious Dalton, jade eyes glittering, talks lyrically of searching for the meaning of life via a return trip to a seaside resort he visited as a child. In the end, however, even he comes to the same conclusion: none of them has actually wrestled with anything quite this big before.

Yet even for an actor as experienced as Dalton, who is returning to the London stage after a 15-year hiatus in Hollywood, his role as Lord Asriel represents a fresh challenge. "I was doing something in rehearsal the other day and felt uncomfortable. I thought: ‘What the f*** is going on here?’ I suddenly realised I was rehearsing with two other characters, one of whom was a daemon made of pipe cleaners and curtain rods, the other a wooden doll 9in high," he says, laughing.



The vital question is, of course, will all this hard work pay off, or has Hytner taken on too titanic a task? Maxwell Martin, who played Irina in the National’s recent Three Sisters, is daunted but optimistic. "I’m tired — this has been a really long rehearsal period — but to be honest, I’ve never been so excited about actually showing a play," she enthuses. "Nick’s script is very action-packed, very immediate, very in-yer-face, and you just have to run with the heartbeat of the piece. I really believe people will come to the National and have a really pleasurable, lovely, exciting day out."

For Dalton, the casting could be seen as redemptive. When he last appeared on the London stage, alongside his then girlfriend, Vanessa Redgrave, he was talked of as the leading classical actor of his day. Then James Bond came along, followed by a number of lucrative film baddies. This summer, he returned to London, where he was excited to hear what Hytner was doing at the National. "I’d worked at the RSC and in the West End, but I’d never worked here," he says. "Nick and I had some friends in common who had been badgering both of us that we should work together. I didn’t know who was meant to call whom, but in the end, I thought, ‘Hell, I’m going to pick up the phone.’ I left a message for Nick saying I would love to work with him. Two weeks later, I got a call, asking, ‘Do you want to be in His Dark Materials?’"



Dalton had not heard of the books, but his casting as the darkly charismatic Asriel should be perfect. A lean and energetic 57, he is craggily handsome, but in a way that matches Philip Larkin’s "Christmas present from Easter Island" description of Ted Hughes. His excitement at being back on stage and back in London is palpable. "I’m beginning to get those feelings that it’s good, that it’s something pure, that as a production, this is starting to sing," he grins. If everyone sings to the same tune, can Hytner’s bold theatrical journey fail?

His Dark Materials previews from Thursday at the National Theatre, London SE1, UK.

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