The Pressure's Off

The actor and playwright on balancing ‘the quietness of writing with the showing-off of acting’

- Jack Watkins

MENTION DAVID Haig to an astute follower of TV comedy and you’ll get a smile of approval for his brilliant portrayals of a peculiarly British kind of seething, pent-up frustration. At the same time, for those with a taste for straight drama on stage and screen, his name on the bill usually serves as a guarantor of quality. Fewer people, however, may be familiar with his accomplishments as a playwright.

The first of his works to be publicly performed, My Boy Jack, based on a Rudyard Kipling poem, went down so well it was adapted for the small screen, with Mr Haig as Kipling and Daniel Radcliffe as his son. The second, The Good Samaritan, about a helpline volunteer who falls in love with a caller, was hailed by our distinguished theatre critic Michael Billington as ‘the kind of linear, issue-raising play that people allegedly don’t write any more’.

The third, Pressure, was given five-star ratings across the board when first performed. Its imminent national tour, with Mr Haig again in the lead role, is richly deserved and overdue.

Although Pressure is a thriller about the familiar subject of D-Day, it focuses on the little-known angle of the extent to which its success owed much to a correct reading of weather conditions, a factor often breezed over in mainstream books on the Second World War. Is Mr Haig an avid reader of military history? ‘no, I’m not obsessed by warfare at all,’ he responds, during our interview at the Park Theatre in north London, where the play’s tour concludes, ‘but what’s always intrigued me are the lateral influences in history or the little guy who influences a major event.