Have you ever started off on the wrong foot with a stranger then spent the rest of the conversation awkwardly trying to get on to the right foot? That’s how my hour with Adrian Dunbar goes. I kick things off by asking the actor about the badges on his trendy denim jacket. The “A” pin is for Arsenal so I mention how much I liked the Gunners legend Tony Adams when I interviewed him about his sobriety. Then, foolishly, I remember aloud that I’d read that Dunbar is sober too. Except it turns out that he isn’t. “They keep getting all that wrong,” he says gruffly. “I stopped drinking when I was about 40 and then I started again when I was about 55.” I ask how much he typically drinks these days. “It’s not an issue, all right?” he growls, arms folded.
It feels as if Dunbar is back in character as Line of Duty’s Ted Hastings, back sniffing out “bent coppers”, but with his glare on me. I quickly move on to his new project, Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter’s 1948 musical, which opens at the Barbican on June 4. The play-within-a-play farce focuses on a divorced couple of warring thespians, Fred and Lilli, who reunite to put on The Taming of the Shrew. Cast in the swaggering male lead, this will be 65-year-old Dunbar’s debut in a musical. The rehearsals seem to be going all right. “It’s hard to tell really because it’s such a huge piece,” he says during his lunch break. “The dancing looks amazing already to me. But then again, I’m not a dancer.”
The singing will be less of a challenge. Dunbar has performed in bands since he was 15 growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. “We were very skinny and very gauche,” he says of his first band, the Breeze (“a limp name”). He later sang backing vocals in an Elvis impersonating troupe before, in his forties, setting up another band. Then, in his fifties, BBC’s Line of Duty came along and interrupted his music career. “It was a real disaster for me in so many ways,” he deadpans.
For all its toe-tapping tunes, Kiss Me, Kate is dated when it comes to sexual politics. At one point Fred spanks his ex-wife in a fight, for example. A New York production in 2019 changed the lyrics of Lilli’s final song, I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple, to wail instead about “people”.
How do you stay true to the beloved original while also ensuring that the show feels fresh for audiences in 2024? “You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Dunbar says firmly. “There are bits that cross the line today and we’re solving those as we come to them.” How much tweaking, adding and subtracting happens is still up in the air. “Nobody really knows until we actually start running it whether what we’ve done is right, whether we need to take things out, whether we actually have gone too far in trying to mitigate the misogyny, but you can’t change the songs.” It’s all about balance. “It’s going to be tricky, but what you rely on entirely is something called a sense of humour.”
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Stephanie Block, a Tony award-winning 51-year-old Broadway star best known for Into the Woods and Wicked, is playing Fred’s ex, Lilli, in her first role in British theatre. “Sadly, I didn’t know who Stephanie was,” Dunbar confesses. “I quickly found out.”
As Kiss Me, Kate deals with backstage fireworks, I ask about his experiences over the decades working as part of various theatre companies. “It’s been mostly good. I think actors get a really bad press in terms of this, because we’re always looking for dissatisfaction or people falling out,” he says. “I’d direct people towards writers and artists if you want to really find out where the nastiness occurs between people, because writers tend to be horrible about each other — I’ve found, at least. There’s a lot of jealousy that exists there. Actors a lot of the time are generous people, kind and open towards one another.”
A Samuel Beckett superfan, Dunbar also stages Beckett festivals, where he works with his wife, the actress Anna Nygh; he directs and she’s in the company. “You have to treat your wife exactly as you treat everybody else,” he says. “You can’t be going, ‘Fabulous, darling, that was wonderful.’ You’ve got to give her some notes as well.”
However, it sounds like his main reason for taking on Kiss Me, Kate was his late mum, Pauline, who was a big fan of musicals, performed in amateur productions and particularly liked this Cole Porter classic. “Maybe that was something that prompted me to do it,” he says. “She was a big inspiration to me and, like a lot of people, your mother gives you the licence to go and do something.”
In a previous interview, Dunbar said that his biggest disappointment was “not having come from a class that understands how the world works”. He grew up during the Troubles in a Catholic family as the eldest of seven; his father was a carpenter and the expectation was that he’d also go into a trade. Instead, after stints working in factories and an abattoir, he moved to London where he won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1980.
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“A lot of people, especially from the middle classes, become very aware early on about connections and how connections are made … how you think ahead as to where you might want to be going with your life,” he says. “But if you come from an ordinary working-class family then those things aren’t really an issue at all. If you want to move through other levels in society, then you’re going to have to learn that on the way. And, of course, that leads to a hell of a lot of mistakes or missed opportunities.”
After the awards and adoration for the 1991 film Hear My Song, which Dunbar starred in and co-wrote, his career didn’t hit the stratospheric, transatlantic heights that were perhaps expected. “Sometimes when you make a big splash with something everything stops, because everybody thinks you’re off doing things,” he says. He didn’t move to Los Angeles, conscious that his creative passions lay in Ireland, Beckett and Irish music.
Aged 53, after years of work as a respected but jobbing actor, he landed in Jed Mecurio’s Line of Duty — “a complete game changer”. He seems genuinely pleased that dizzying success and fame came after he’d passed his half-century. “I’m sure it’s much more difficult to deal with in your twenties. Whereas when you’re in your fifties, you can throw a pretty sanguine eye over the whole thing. And just realise it’s part of the job and take it as it comes, be nice to people and all the rest of it.”
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t take the sex symbol label that his Line of Duty role brought him too seriously either. “You have to approach it with all the humour and hilarity that it deserves.”
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He remains close friends with his co-stars Martin Compston and Vicky McClure, pointing out that we’re meeting on their shared birthday. So, the million-dollar question that he’s already been asked a million times: will there be a seventh series? “We all want it to come back. It’s apposite that today should be their birthdays because I really don’t want them getting any older. I don’t want to get any older either because we don’t want to be coming back when we’re in a wheelchair. Ted Hastings with a Zimmer frame.”
Dunbar recently wriggled out of jury service by arguing that people might confuse him with corrupt copper-hunting Hastings. When I raise this, though, a froideur descends. “I find it amazing that you knew that,” he says. I read it in The Times, I say. “I absolutely applaud you for being such a sleuth. But yes, no, I mean, why is it of interest?” He clarifies that he’s just shunted his civic duties a year down the line.
Dunbar has already proved his singing skills in the ITV crime drama Ridley, in which he plays a warbling detective. Season two comes out later this year. “Vera is a bit of a gold standard for Sunday-night telly,” he says. “We’re plugging that kind of territory and still trying to give it a little bit of edge.”
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But his favourite role these days is being a grandfather to Zephyr, the two-year-old child of his daughter, Madeleine, a songwriter. “I’m really enjoying that role of being somebody who can have these small children think he is great for absolutely no reason at all,” he says, grinning. Would he take on a children’s television role to entertain Zephyr? “That would be really good. If I can get a part in Peppa Pig, I think that would be through-the-roof hero status. Or In the Night Garden. Makka Pakka and all that.”
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The day we meet, Kevin Spacey is back in the news thanks to a Channel 4 documentary, which included fresh allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Since Spacey was cleared in a London court last year of sexually assaulting four men, and with no other convictions, some in the acting world have quietly mooted the idea of the actor returning to run a British regional theatre. “I think it’d be very foolhardy for anybody to give him a job at the minute,” Dunbar says, clearly uncomfortable.
Keen to end on the right foot, I bring up his adored Emerald Isle.
Dunbar, who has previously voiced his belief that Sinn Fein will deliver a united Ireland in the future, regularly returns and has a home between Sligo and Donegal. Back in Enniskillen, there’s a black and white mural of Ted Hastings with one of his famous catchphrases: “Now we’re suckin’ diesel.”
“When I’m at home in Enniskillen, I’m just who I am. Everybody knows me prior to all this nonsense,” he says, acknowledging that there is a local pride in producing such a successful export. “Nobody’s sprayed any graffiti across my mural anyway. That’s the litmus test.”
Kiss Me, Kate is at the Barbican, London EC2, from Jun 4; kissmekatemusical.com
