Maybe you’ve seen a person like this, alone, in a bar, wanting to be rescued from his loneliness.
In Me, a self-portrait, you detect a touch of melancholy in the wide, pensive eyes, the tight mouth. You could see the play of solitude and introspection in “Come Softly to Me,” a solo show at New York’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co., last summer. More profoundly, his work aches with an interiority that feels deeply private, emerging from the tremble of heartache, the tenderness of a break-up, or the remembered joy of a fleeting encounter. In many ways, Fratino is the best kind of candidate for a state-wide lockdown, not only because he is used to working alone, but also because his frame of reference is often no larger than the intimacy of a bedroom.
The play and movie introduced a cavalcade of young talents (James Corden, Samuel Barnett, and Dominic Cooper were all part of the ensemble cast) and catapulted Tovey to success in shows such as HBO’s acclaimed Looking and last year’s BBC mini-series Years and Years, a dystopia of our near future with uncanny parallels to our current condition.Īn enthusiastic art collector-Tovey used earnings from The History Boys to purchase a Tracey Emin print-he is a self-described fanboy of the young artist Louis Fratino, who lived and works in New York. It’s been 14 years since Tovey came barreling into the public spotlight courtesy of The History Boys, the brilliant Alan Bennett play, later adapted into a movie (Tovey starred in both), about a group of high school students preparing for university. Tovey is also using this unexpected time to record episodes of his popular podcast, Talk Art, in which he interviews artists, curators, and gallerists with his co-host, Robert Diament. Residents observe social distancing etiquette by gathering on their balconies to watch. Instead of performing on the Great White Way, the actor found himself lounging around in PJs and using his time to organize live events in the courtyard of his apartment building: Shakespearean monologues, unplugged music sessions, poetry, DJ sessions.
The next day, Tovey flew back to London to be reunited with his boyfriend and three dogs. Shortly before this interview, the actor received a call from New York’s Booth Theater, where the show was in previews, informing him that Broadway would be going dark with immediate effect. Under normal circumstances, Russell Tovey would be spending this spring and summer on Broadway six nights a week performing in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee’s classic dissection of a failing marriage. Shortly after lockdown began, actor and artist discussed their earliest encounters with Robert Mapplethorpe and the ways pandemic art can define a generation