On my way to interview Laurie Kynaston, who is about to reprise his acclaimed performance as the tormented teenager Nicolas in the West End transfer of Florian Zeller’s The Son, I encounter the 25-year-old loitering in a doorway near the Duke of York’s theatre, where we have arranged to meet. “I got here early and I didn’t want to seem too keen,” he says, whipping off his sunglasses to reveal imploring brown eyes that could make Bambi look shifty.
His natty wardrobe choices this morning suggest a one-man Spandau Ballet revival: gleaming brogues and a billowing gold-patterned shirt tucked into pleated trousers and left partially unbuttoned, exposing a triangle of pale chest and a pendant. Once we are inside, he is keen to set foot on the stage where he will be performing next month, but his publicist cautions against any treading of the boards today. “Maybe just look at it from the stalls,” she suggests. “Health and safety and all that.”
A glimpse is enough to make him excited about the forthcoming transfer. “The play really rips along, and we don’t get to catch our breath,” he says once we are seated in the deserted bar. “It feels like a bullet fired from a gun.” The appropriateness of that image will be apparent to anyone who saw The Son in its first UK production at the Kiln in London earlier this year. (It’s part of a trilogy by Zeller, preceded by The Father and The Mother.) The hunting rifle given to Pierre, Nicolas’s dad, by his own father, and later discovered by Nicolas, is like a twisted homage to Larkin: man hands on firearms to man …
As the play starts, Nicolas, who lives with his mother, is reeling from his parents’ separation. He moves in with Pierre, who now lives with a new partner and their baby, but this fails to arrest the boy’s slide into depression. “The play feels like it has a series of red flags, and some people have asked, ‘How could no one see quite how distressed Nicolas is? We could see it.’” The writing is on the wall – hence the idea of having Kynaston already on stage, scrawling words on one side of the stark white set while the audience files in. “But over a six-month period, there would’ve been a lot of time when those things weren’t happening and everything seemed normal. You can get used to that behaviour.”
He and the director, Michael Longhurst, came up with the graffiti idea, but the play’s central metaphor – a trashed set to which the actors are oblivious – belongs to Zeller. “That’s the point: people not noticing things that are right in front of them. We walk around the mess and even on top of it. We step on Lego, which is actually quite painful.”
Kynaston offers no shortage of reasons why Zeller’s work is so satisfying to perform: the playwright’s slightly off-kilter word choices, or his knack for creating a family full of characters who don’t quite fit into it. “Florian lets us get to know everyone and their frustrations. We’re rooting for all of them.” Something else makes The Son particularly special for him. “You know at the front of every script it has the original cast? Like ‘Maggie Smith played this part in 1969 …’ It’s always been a dream of mine to have my name there. And now it’s happened.”
Kynaston was raised on a small farm in north Wales. “It was the Shropshire border,” he says when I inquire after his accent, “so I’ve got this neutral, RP-ish thing.” He and his three older brothers had a “very outdoorsy, tree-climbing, jumping-in-ponds sort of childhood.” He acted at school, joined the National Youth Theatre of Wales and has scarcely been out of work since. He made his West End debut in The Ferryman and played a young Johnny Marr in England Is Mine, for which he received the blessing of the Smiths guitarist. (“I’ve been told he’s a good guy and did a good job,” Marr told the Guardian last year.)
He also played young Danny Baker on TV in Cradle to Grave and still counts the DJ as “a very close friend”, describing his sacking from the BBC as “chaos”. Baker had posted a tweet with what he said were unintended racist connotations. “You’d hope people would pay the same attention to the apology as they did to what led to it,” the actor says. “But it’s hard to slow that down once it’s all under way.” Next up are roles in the dystopian Amazon series The Feed and the film of Caitlin Moran’s novel How to Build a Girl; Kynaston describes the latter as “full of punk and attitude and sass and humour and love and music”.
By the time that is unleashed on the world, he will once again be fully up to his enormous eyes in Nicolas’s turmoil, scribbling on the walls and trampling Lego underfoot, health and safety be damned.
The Son is at the Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 2 November. How to Be a Girl premieres at the Toronto film festival on 7 September. The Feed starts on Virgin Media in the UK and on Amazon Prime Video elsewhere on 16 September.
