Baltimore to the moor

The moment that changed the professional standing of Clarke Peters came relatively late in his life, and announced itself with a whisper. In 2001, he joined a largely African-American cast for a new US television series that promised to delve into the causes of inner-city drug abuse and the brutal vagaries of municipal politics. That the show had been commissioned by HBO was something of a minor miracle, given its lack of commercial promise. But the network believed in The Wire, and so did Peters.

The rest is not so much history, as one of the brightest cultural surprises of the past decade. The Wire slow-burned its moor way to huge critical acclaim, and forced a rethink of television’s potential as a source of dark and complex drama. At the heart of the show was Peters’ calm, understated performance as Detective Lester Freamon, a fount of moral rectitude in an unjust and ugly universe.

When I ask Peters if he ever considered that this would be the role for which he would be most remembered, he laughs out loud, and long. “Never, ever, ever.” And then he springs to explain why he got the role. “It was my time acting in theatre. David Simon [The Wire’s creator] recognised the difference between actors and people who wanted to be stars, or had a good film technique.” Indeed, Simon had first seen Peters in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which had originated in the UK in the late 1990s before transferring to the US.

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The love of theatre is a clue to perhaps the single most surprising thing about Peters: now 59, he has lived in the UK since the early 1970s, and it is the stage, of all the art forms, which he regards as an almost sacred space – one that can help heal riven societies through its ability to educate and inform. He possesses an almost Reithian idealism about the potential of theatre, rather than the broadcast media, to bring people to a higher state of consciousness. “It has to be taken seriously,” he says, in a solemn and captivating baritone. “I take it seriously.”

To that end, he is returning to the British stage later this month with his Wire co-star Dominic West, in a new production of Othello at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. We are chatting after a rehearsal in London’s Jerwood Space, and Peters seems, if not in role, certainly in fruity Shakespearean mode, stopping carefully on all his Ts and delivering thunderously on a variety of topics. One of which, it turns out, is the decline of his beloved art form. Peters cites recent cuts in arts funding as a symptom of neglect. “We are no longer feeding people’s spirits,” he says. “Something is being lost. And that is very disheartening. I wish the old guard were here to talk about it.”

The old guard?

“The great character actors. John Mills. Denholm Elliott. They are the cats that I dig.” This is possibly the first time Mills and Elliott have ever been so described, and it is pleasingly bizarre to think of them serving as inspirations for Peters’ portrayal of Lester Freamon in The Wire.

Before that series took off, Peters was best known for devising the hit musical Five Guys Named Moe. Once more, he traces its origins to Britain’s arts scene. “It could only have happened here,” he says. A first, skeletal version of the musical opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, after which it was more fully developed at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre. “I asked if I could use the theatre’s resources, the publicity department, and so on, and they said, ‘Yes, sure’. And on the third night, we noticed a queue wrapping itself around the Cottesloe.” Six months after the run, Peters was asked to take it to the West End. It then transferred to Broadway, where it earned a Tony nomination.

Peters says he got into musical theatre by accident. He left the US to visit his brother in Paris in 1971, and ended up working for a production of Hair. “I was doing wardrobe, and within a month I was on stage. And then from there, I went on tour, and used the time to learn everything I could about acting. My family could not afford to send me to college, so this was the best that I could do.”

He moved from Paris to London two years later, where he joined a group, The Majestics, and earned a five-year contract as a songwriter. He had no intention, he says, of being pigeonholed as a musical act … serious theatre beckoned. But when he knocked on its door, there was disappointment. He arrived at auditions and found his skin colour was an unexpected issue.

“When I got here, things were not as liberal as they are now. I went for a role in Titus Andronicus at the RSC and I could tell they were going through the process because they needed to go through the process, rather than look at me as an actor.”

Then a casting elsewhere for Othello ended with the conclusion that there were no black actors suitable for the part, a decision which Peters found “ridiculous. I had only been here a few months and I knew half a dozen actors who could have done it. Did you ever hear Norman Beaton speak verse? Wow! But I didn’t have the appetite to fight that battle. I just thought, let it be.”

A few decades on, he acknowledges that matters have improved. But playing in this production of Othello, he says, raises some old issues for him. “I have played it once before, in a multi-racial cast. This time I am the only black guy in the room. But it has led me to thinking: just because Othello is black, it doesn’t make the play about racism. The more I look at it, the more I see the play as being about a man who is trying to hold on to virtue, in a world that is falling apart. His sense of trust and honesty is just ridiculous.

“And then I got to thinking: why is there always so much [debate] about how clever Iago is? About his insidious charm? Why are we applauding him? Are we not in some sense celebrating evil here?” But Shakespeare often gave his baddies the best lines, I say. “But we seem to be almost afraid of celebrating someone who can be soft and gentle and virtuous.”

Which brings our conversation back to The Wire, a decidedly ungentle view of the contemporary world that allowed little sense of redemption. Notwithstanding this, Peters becomes visibly more excited when he talks of his part in the work. “It was the first time I had ever done a series. In fact, I don’t think I was hired for the full run. I didn’t know who [Freamon] was, or what he was about. But by the third episode, I started to get really interested – where was this going?”

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By the third series, Peters had sensed that the show was entering the public’s consciousness. “I was in New York and got off at 42nd Street (I was doing Chicago), and I remember feeling that, suddenly, people were looking differently at me. I didn’t really know anything about the impact it had been having in America. And that was when I began to sense that this show was nothing to do with these little [Baltimore] neighbourhoods. It was bigger than that.”

I wish John Mills and Denholm Elliott were still here – they are the cats that I dig

True to his beliefs that the best art should inform and educate, Peters cites The Wire as an example of a work illuminating an intractable social problem. “I knew nothing about industry when I started to do it. All of my understanding came from really watching the episodes: that this is what happens when an industry leaves an area … when you close the mines … this is what happened in Glasgow and Ireland. I was doing a university course on writing at the time and, together, they just opened my mind. These were my university years.”

Such is his devotion to Simon’s work that Peters has kept all the first drafts of the script, which he describes as “perfect – the version. There are characters who never even made it onto the screen. It is like Shakespeare. Behind every single word is a concept. And you have to really look at a sentence to get it. Now everyone is trying to do it.”

British television was lagging some way behind, I tell him. “But the stories are here!” he responds emphatically. “You can find them in Bermondsey, in Bradford. Don’t tell me they are not here. But someone has to write them. Put your balls on the table! [I think he is addressing Britain’s writing community here, rather than me.] Really, just do it! I love this place, and to see it not excel hurts me. My kids were brought up here. I have a spiritual investment in this country.” It is an issue that goes beyond party politics, he says, which produces “the same nonsense” whoever is in power. His broadside is passionate, and then it suddenly subsides. “End of rant,” he concludes softly.

His admiration for Simon is evidently mutual, for Peters was asked to be in Treme, Simon’s follow-up to The Wire. Another biting series, Treme is better humoured, but addresses the restoration of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “It was a no-brainer,” he says, of the decision to take part, and then confesses to having fallen in love with the city. “I would almost live there, if my wife would allow it.”

Treme (pronounced Tremay, after the district in the city) uses the various strains of music running through New Orleans almost as characters in their own right. “There is the jazz, of course, which is the music. But then you’ve got zydeco – I never thought I would love zydeco! And there’s the cajun music … and even the buskers there can all play. And if they are crap, then someone better will come along and run them off the street.” He pauses for a moment and says solemnly: “This has been the best part of my life so far.”

I ask him how his former colleague Dominic West was doing as Iago in rehearsals. “I hate the moooooor!” he impersonates hammily. Did they come as a package deal? “I like to think so. I said I would do it if he did it, and I think he said the same.” Now wasn’t this a funny old turn of affairs, I say: two actors from a television series helping to galvanise a young audience to come to the theatre, even though the television series was arguably even darker than Shakespearean tragedy?

“I’m not sure so many viewers of The Wire are theatre-goers. So it may bring them out. I hope so.”

As I take my leave, he tells me he will stay on for an hour or so to work on his lines, and then go to catch Wynton Marsalis at Ronnie Scott’s – the prospect of which brings a broad smile to his face. “Everyone loves jazz. Even when you are in New Orleans, and you are woken at three in the morning by some band in the street. And they are always really hot.”

Othello is at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, from September 15.