Master builder

The greatest compliment I can pay Reece Dinsdale is that I reckon you could easily walk past him in the street and miss him.

He seems so ordinary, so normal, so everyman. You can imagine him easily blending in with the crowd while watching his beloved Huddersfield Town FC. Well, certainly more than the other famous acting fan of the team, Patrick Stewart.

What is particularly striking about this ability to disappear is that as the characters he plays he is unforgettable.

It was when he played Alan Bennett at the West Yorkshire Playhouse – more of which later – that I first realised that he has the ability that separates truly great actors: he can shape shift.

Likewise Richard III, it is as though the role subsumed him entirely. He didn’t just play Richard – he was the Hunchback king.

It’s a skill that is about to be tested to its limits in a new version of an Ibsen play that sees Dinsdale carry pretty much every single scene.

I’ve seen Dinsdale around the West Yorkshire Playhouse quite a lot recently, as I was opening my own play at the theatre while he was in rehearsals and he wears the mantle of a man working his backside off.

The play Dinsdale has been rehearsing is (the fall of ) The Master Builder and is a new version of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder written by acclaimed playwright Zinnie Harris. “It’s based on the original, but James (Brining, the play’s director) along with Zinnie took the original strands and ran with them,” says Dinsdale.

“It has the same characters, the same themes. There is a particular strand of the play that we’ve taken and run with and importantly, we’ve set it in West Yorkshire in 2017.”

The first time West Yorkshire audiences saw Dinsdale on the stage of the Playhouse was in the theatre’s very first production on Quarry Hill. When the theatre moved to its current home in 1990, the first production was Wild Oats and it featured the classically trained Dinsdale in the cast. He has spoken previously about the fact that his father urged him to take the role, telling him it would be ‘like opening the batting for Yorkshire’.

Following that role he became something of a fixture at the theatre, but his renewed relationship with the theatre in recent years is one that has more formality to it.

Named associate artist, he was the first acting associate of the theatre, a role he clearly relishes as it gives him an official link to a theatre that clearly means much to him.

He renewed his relationship with the theatre in 2014 when he played Alan Bennett in a dramatisation of the writer’s diaires in Untold Stories.

It was in this role that I first understood his great skill.

Dinsdale, the man I remember so vividly as an undercover-cop-turned-football-hooligan in the British movie ID playing the national treasure and teddy bear Alan Bennett? I was... not so much sceptical as intrigued.

Dinsdale was staggeringly good. It was like watching Bennett on stage and Dinsdale provided a performance that went so far beyond imitation it was impossible to tear your eyes away.

He went on to play Richard III and now comes Ibsen.

“James, who is also artistic director of the theatre, and I were talking about what play we would do next,” says Dinsdale – one of the benefits of being an associate artist means having access to the hand on the tiller.

“I suggested Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People, he suggested The Master Builder. We made a deal; I read the one he suggested, he read the one I suggested. When I finished it I said I love it, I want to do it and he said that’s great, but we’re not doing that, we’re doing a different version.”

The version is the one currently in rehearsal with a script by Zinnie Harris, an acclaimed writer whose work and star have been steadily on the rise for some time now. “This version doffs a cap to the original, but people shouldn’t come expecting that play. Ours is, however, bleak and very, very funny.”

Speaking of funny, while my memories of Dinsdale on screen are most vivid courtesy of the movie ID, many still remember him as Matthew in Home to Roost.

Starring opposite John Thaw, Dinsdale played Thaw’s young son moving back in with his father, upsetting his solitary, grumpily happy existence. “On a Friday night we had viewing figures of 14 million. That’s a lot of folk tuning in and seeing you. The very special thing about the show is that mums, dads and kids would all sit down and watch it together, something really quite rare.”

The level of fame that comes with being beamed into 14 million homes is something that would clearly sit at odds with the family man who remains loyal to West Yorkshire and to the football team his family has supported for three generations.

If his role as associate artist at the Playhouse and love of his local football team were not enough to demonstrate just how rooted Dinsdale is in West Yorkshire, there’s another role he’s now playing.

Recently announced as the patron of the newly reopened Square Chapel Arts Centre in Halifax, he joins George Costigan and Sally Wainwright in becoming a patron.

“I was invited to see the space and was knocked for six by the renovation. It was a pleasure to be asked and to become a patron, but for the next five weeks this play will take up all of my life.”

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Reece Dinsdale was born in Normanton and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Several film roles came his way in the early 1980s, then in 1985 he was cast as Matthew Willows opposite John Thaw in Home to Roost. In 1995 he played against type as an undercover cop who infiltrates a gang of football hooligans and is seduced by violence. In 2008 he joined the cast of Coronation Street and has recently begun directing for TV, with several episodes of Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On under his belt.

(the fall of) The Master Builder, West Yorkshire Playhouse, September 30 to October 21.