The Haunted Actor: with James Swanton

Dominic is joined by the inimitable James Swanton  who is performing A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and Haunted Man in person this year at the Dickens Museum. And for those of you listening outside the UK you can watch a live stream of his Haunted Man - filmed inside number 48 Doughty Street - on the 11th December.

James read English at Selwyn College Cambridge. Since graduating his acting credits include Sikes and Nancy at London’s Trafalgar Studios, Irving Undead and this years’ upcoming BBC Ghost Story for Christmas Lot No.249

His inspirations are far ranging, and a brilliant English teacher by the name of Mr Crisp who took James under his wing when he was at secondary school and set him on the path that he still treads today …

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SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hi

Dickens, Solo Performance, and Covid

SPEAKER_00 0:17

everyone. I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast today the brilliant actor James Swanton, who I've crossed paths with a little over the years, although usually in code. For example, there were occasions where James would arrive at the Dickens Museum in London to perform any one of the five Christmas books, and would find sitting in the corner by the fireplace a ghostly outline of a Scrooge puppet that I had left covered up like a phantom. There were equally occasions where I would arrive to perform a Christmas carol and would find a white shirt with black boots on a chair, and by the hearth a heavy chain coiled on the ground. And I'd think to myself, My God, he uses an actual chain for Marley's ghost. These physical clues that we appeared to leave each other over Christmas were little reminders that neither of us were alone in our endeavors to adapt and perform Dickens or share the great man's works with the public. This happened over a number of Christmases, until 2020, when all performances went virtual, suddenly we had the chance to watch each other's a Christmas carol. I saw James live stream his carol from his hometown of York that year, and was transported by his dark, winding performance, where he appeared to gather shadows from his surroundings to conjure the spirits that torment Scrooge. An acknowledged master of the solo form, James is performing a Christmas carol, the chimes, and haunted man in person this year at the Dickens Museum. But for those of you listening outside the UK, there is a link in the description where you can watch a live stream of his Haunted Man filmed inside number forty eight Dowdy Street on the eleventh of December. James read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and since graduating his acting credits include Sykes and Nancy at London's Trafalgar Studios, and this year's upcoming BBC Ghost Story for Christmas, Lot No. 249. His inspirations are far ranging, and include a brilliant English teacher by the name of Mr. Crisp, who took James under his wing when he was at secondary school and set him on the path that he still treads today. James, welcome to Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire. It's so great to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Hello, Dominic. I'm absolutely delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

We've never seen each other's work in person, have we? We haven't seen each other live, I don't think.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

No, we do have a pandemic to blame for that, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 2:50

That's that's true, that's true. And we but the the advantage to the pandemic was that we both got to see each other perform virtually for a minute. Because you had a uh a film of the haunted man that you did inside the Dickens Museum, so I finally properly caught up with your work. And I was so struck by the uniqueness of the of what you bring to Dickens and solo Dickens and solo performing in general. And just immediately dive headfirst into something that might be quite hard to articulate. What is your approach to that extraordinary physicality that you that you bring to that work?

SPEAKER_01 3:27

I don't have a sort of overarching theory or explanation as to why I'm so strange. Um Maybe that is fiance, maybe it is just because I'm a rather peculiar actor. Um I definitely don't have a deliberate or conscious quote unquote technique. People have said I have a style, and I've always found that a slightly alienating experience, because to me the word style sort of suggests you've devised something or come up with something in a very sort of conscious, even strategic way, and for me it's all sort of been intuitive, and I s I suppose it might even go back to childhood, sort of pulling faces in front of mirrors. But um it's it's certainly true that the grotesque has always spoken to me very um powerfully, and although I don't strive to be grotesque, it always seems to come out naturally where Dickens is concerned. Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. Who could have seen his hollow cheek, his black attired figure, his grizzled hair hanging like tangled seaweed about his face, but might have said he looked like a haunted man.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

I'm interested because I I saw I just remembered, of course, I saw your Christmas Carol when you were doing it at your so I saw I saw that live stream of that, and then I saw the film of the haunted man. And there is this um I mean, God, as actors, you never want a label on your back, do you? You want to feel like, no, well, I can do this as well, I do this, I do this. But I was just very struck by the I d I don't know, just that that physical expression that you you're able to do and and the conjuring element of your performance, where you really watch you and you but you really feel the atmosphere change. I mean, I remember vividly seeing the Or Haunted Man, and I remember how it started as well, where you're in front of the mirror.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Oh, yeah, yeah, the um the opening of The Haunted Man, which um that winding, almost self-contorting description going in and around Stephen Redlaw's person. Um it's it's a fascinating kind of extension on how Ebenezer Scrooge is evoked at the start of a Christmas carol. Because with Scrooge there's a sort of colour and an exuberance and an energy to it, whereas with Redlaw it's all a kind of imploding anti-energy. It's um well, it's depression manifest, essentially, isn't it? It's um it is truly haunting. You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight in the dim winter time when the wind was blowing shrill and shrewd with the going down of the blurred sun.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

The film had been nicely graded as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

It had been, it certainly had been. Alex, um, as as you'll know from your many pseudo films at the Dickens Museum, does a marvellous job on these things. Um Yeah, I was incredibly worried about it, Dominic, because it turned out, um well, I mean I mean what I knew on the day was I had slept for about half an hour the night before, because I'd been feeling slightly unwell. Um and what I realized the next day was, oh God, I have COVID. What? I didn't know this. I did this as an exclusive. I hate to. It is, and maybe I shouldn't be saying this even now, but the film has been on, and you know, given it was a solo film, there wasn't a terrible risk of infecting other actors. Although one of the great ironies is um Alex, our cameraman, lighting designer, grader, editor, you know, he he can do everything, he's a miracle worker. We'd have the filming scheduled a few weeks prior to when we actually did it, and we'd had to cancel it then because Alex had come down with COVID. So then a month later we were doing it, and Crikey, I had COVID. I didn't realise it. I I I knew I wasn't right, and I knew I was finding the day um an overpowering effort, but um It's sort of weirdly fitting for the haunted man though, given one of his lines in in in the middle of the narrative when things are really going to hell, is uh I am infected, I am infectious. I'm just very glad that, you know, there there wasn't any disaster that came out of that, but um oh god, it it does seem to be a recurring pattern for me, Dominic, but um my my encounters with Dickens are a bit too intense for their own good. I mean that Christmas carol you're talking about I had terrible problems with because I found out five minutes beforehand that there was apparently a time limit on the Instagram stream, which which meant I was having to cut and trim bits of my adaptation on the fly. Which is something you can well, you can do it as an actor when you know the material, but um you don't want to be doing it, and if if anyone on the outside derives pleasure from it, great, but you're you're deriving no pleasure from giving it under under such duress.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

In terms of performing, actually, for you, because I understand, I don't know if you relate to this, but I know the feeling of acting and enjoying it as it's happening. But I also know the feeling of acting just being a real slog and enjoying it after the event and being so glad I did it and being proud of it afterwards. Where are you on that as a performer? Do you tend to with the solo work, do you how where does it go for you normally?

SPEAKER_01 8:59

It's so diverse in how it can unfold. Um The trouble with solo performance is you can't go off and gather yourself and come back on and feel refreshed, or you know, you you can't have that word with yourself. You're just sort of trapped in your own head, while simultaneously doing a lot of quite technically complicated business. And and very often there is just that small voice in my head in parallel with all the on stage action just going, oh god, oh no, I've lost it. Oh, it's all going wrong. Oh dear, oh god. Um it's it's that thing of not being in the moment, isn't it? You're you're kind of constantly looking at what you've just done and you're thinking, well, that wasn't quite right, or that didn't come out the way it shouldn't have done, or that wasn't terribly good. And and perhaps you're also in the future as well, forecasting, oh gosh, we've got this bit coming up, and my voice isn't quite hearing what it should be. Um It's such a difficult thing to explain. Because when it goes right, you're functioning at your highest level, and it's it's that feeling, isn't it? Floating above yourself and it's happening to you and it's flowing through you, and but when it doesn't quite work, it's it's fascinating if you can remove yourself emotionally from the experience. But the unfortunate thing with us as actors is we are very emotional people and we are very emotionally connected, and we try to be philosophical, but um that that old phrase dies hard, doesn't it? You're only as good as your last performance. And if you've had two or three on the fly where you felt, gosh, that was uh not quite uh not quite up to snuff. It's um it's it's very vexing.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Um I think I think one of the hardest things though at the same time is the fact that your perception, one's own perception whilst performing, can be so completely off.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Oh, completely skewed. Well well, it's the old it's the old truism, isn't it, Dominic? It's uh you know, who is the worst judge of an actor's performance? Himself.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

This is the thing I really respect about you, and I'm sure this is what audiences will feel, and you know, your friends in the industry and everything is the risks that you're willing to take. You take real risks as a performer. You really go out on a limb. You know, and you say you say at the start, you know, you you said at the start about how you know people say, Oh, your style. You go, well, I don't really have a style, I'm just doing my my thing. But as an observer seeing your work, you know, I think, oh, this is definitely this is definitely swanton-esque, this this is what's going on here. Which is that, you know, if you think of the 19th century and the styles of acting in the 19th century, the first thing is what you're not doing is you're not doing historical reenactments, you're not trying to do the exact gestures that were drilled into actors potentially at the time, you know, any of the sort of hieroglyphics of of 19th century performance. But what you do do that I think would chime with Irving, for example, is the your use of language and word painting, first of all, I think. That's one thing I would say, but also the the physical expression of emotion. But where you differ is actually physically, there's something abstract. You're not always physically representing a human form. You're representing the inner life of a of a human being. Does that make sense? So you can tort yourself in ways.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

I think it does, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

And what would you say to that word painting? I don't even know if that's the right phrase.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

No, it's it's it's a word I've used before, and I'm I think that's true. I can't do it any other way easily. I would have to have a lot of direction, which I would probably find to be something of a straitjacket instead of an emancipation to do dickens in any other way. Um and I think a lot of this arises from limitation. That's not me trying to brush aside praise either. I I I mean it sincerely. I think limitation is the key to creating anything that you might deem a work of art. Um For actors, especially with the solo form, where you don't have other actors to add their own colours and their own textures into the mix. I think it's a situation where you and I I don't I don't know if you've felt this at all, but you come up against your limitations and your strengths, and I think they're sort of the same thing a lot of the time. I am here. The haunted man turned suddenly and stared upon the ghost. The ghost, sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair and stared on him.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Look upon me! I am he neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still astroven suffered.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

So I think underlying a lot of this is um melodrama which is a much abused word, and it's usually used in an insulting way, but um I think particularly at the end of my time at university, I started to think very seriously about the true spirit of melodramatic acting. Um it kind of came about in this way. I'd I'd done in my last year at university a one-man play of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where I played Quasimodo for 90 minutes. And I think to this day it's still the thing I've done which has been most warmly acclaimed by audiences. I I I had a I had a a uh a professor uh an academic come to it, and he he he said afterwards that was melodramatic acting, and I was quite quite struck

Exploring Melodramatic Acting and Limitations

SPEAKER_01 14:37

by his use of that because he meant it in a complimentary way, and of course the phrase normally isn't used in a complimentary way, so I I became very, very interested in sort of figuring out how to approach melodramatic acting. Now this academic was also instrumental in me doing Sykes and Nancy, because he also said, I think I think he sent me an email actually, um, saying, you know, this was high gothic melodrama, and then he just put as the last phrase, perhaps some Dickens readings next, and uh although I'd done some Dickens before at university. I'd done the pe uh a sort of amalgam of the Peak Creek Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, which was sort of an interesting failure for all sorts of reasons. I I think the way I go about things is and again this is what I mean about in the solo form in particular, working within your own limitations. I'm quite a heavy performer. I've got a kind of heavy voice, and even when I think I'm going really quickly, I'm probably going slower than most actors when they try to go quickly, and I I I I I don't think heaviness lends itself to laughter. And generally I think I'm at my funniest when I haven't tried to be funny. And that can horribly backfire. I mean, the worst acting experience of my life was when I played a part I'd been longing to play for a while, which was um a very young Fry Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, and audiences just laughed at me for weeks and weeks. And it was awful, and I couldn't make it work for me at all. It was just crippling. And the more you went on stage wanting them not to laugh at certain things, the more they did. I mean, you can you can point the finger in numerous directions as to why it didn't work. You know, it could be incompetent staging as much as me acting incompetently. It could be any number of things. It could be an audience bored and needing to laugh, but um it's it's lovely to feel in control of a laugh or or to feel it's a sort of benevolent laugh. It was um uh a laugh which helped. And I'm I'm I'm I'm certainly not one of those actors who's hypersensitive about laughter coming in what I deem to be the wrong place, because often those can be the most interesting moments.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

So melodrama then, your tutor at Cambridge gave you that little label and pointed you towards that little nugget, gave yeah, and pointed you towards towards Dickens. And this led to Sykes and Nancy, is that right? Was that your first Dickens at the Trafalgar Studios?

SPEAKER_01 17:12

It certainly became my first professional brush with Dickens. I I I had as I said done my unsuccessful show Um Pick Creek and Nickleby, um, the the the interesting failure. And uh at university when when I was uh yeah, I was nineteen at that point. Um and then Sykes and Nancy um came about when I was in my final week at university, and it came about in a very haphazard, thrown together fashion, because the peculiar thing with Cambridge University is um you you can't go there to just train as an actor. You can study drama as part of a course called English education and drama, but I hadn't even had the good sense to do that. I'd just I'd just gone to do English, and um a lot of the reason I gone there to do English, Dominic, was because I deeply wanted to be an actor, and I knew Cambridge had this reputation for theatre and drama, but I had absolutely no faith in my ability to do it on a professional basis. Um the idea of applying to a drama school terrified me to my core. I think I think acting meant so much to me that I was completely unable to face going through that gauntlet of probable rejection, and I think it may go all the way back to secondary school, Dominic, and um I've had a few really inspirational English teachers in my life, and uh I think you tend to scratch a lot of actors and you find an inspirational English teacher actually.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

But um They're the best teachers always anyway, aren't they?

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Um they often do drama as well, and um it was um Mr. Crisp for me at um secondary school, who um was really, really encouraging to me, because he he was he was like my drama teacher first of all in I think year nine. So God, what age are you then? You're like thirteen, fourteen? And he was encouraging in a very unexpected way, because um there was a production of Macbeth that was going on, and I got it into my head that I might be able to play Macbeth. And, you know, we all have his monologues that we're expected to prepare for the audition, and I I prepared mine so carefully and so diligently, I I, in retrospect, over-prepared it to death. Um and I went in and essentially gave a Victorian performance. I knew every gesture I would do, I I had overcoloured every line to the point of incomprehensibility. Um it was very passionate, it was certainly very dramatic. It wasn't Macbeth, it probably didn't make any sense. But I thought it was fantastic. I thought I thought I was doing everything brilliantly. I I I I thought I was inspired and genius. Um and Mr. Crisp did the kindest possible thing, which was to tell me quite how mannered and quite how poor it was. Um and it was it was deeply, deeply hurtful at the time. But um I yeah, I I I wound up in Macbeth as in as you know, a sort of thirteen or fourteen-year-old King Duncan, which is uh slightly slightly bruising to your ego. But um Mr. Chris, after we'd done this production of Macbeth, I f I think he must have seen that acting and theatre and drama, it meant a huge amount to me, even if you know you couldn't cast me in every conceivable part. And he he he just sort of walked past me in a corridor at the end of that year at school and said, Oh James, James, I'm thinking of doing a Christmas carol. And I think you'd be quite good as Scrooge. And then he just walked off and I was like, Oh, fuck the So I spent all that summer holiday thinking, Oh my god, there might be a production of a Christmas Caroline. I really, really want to play Scrooge, and um you know, sure enough, there were auditions, and I went in and read for Scrooge and was desperate to get it, and you know, thankfully I did, and it's the early experience I had that made me think I might possibly be able to find a way of doing this. I'm not going to play be able to play every part, but I I might be able to do something that has a bit more heft and a bit more weight to it than being grotesque in a one-dimensional way. Because this for me is what's so moving about Scrooge. He has all of his different facets. He can be grotesque, he can be funny almost in the way of a kind of musical comic. He um he he he he's so many different things, but the miracle of a Christmas carol is at the end of it he's a human being. And more than that, he's all of us. We are all Scrooge. And it's the magic that's in a Christmas carol that simply isn't quite there in any of the subsequent Christmas books. I mean Trotivek is grotesque and he's not an everyman. He's he's sympathetic and but but you know, I I I find it very hard to identify with Trotivek in the way I can identify. Identify with Scrooge. I think possibly because Trottivek is such a good man. Maybe maybe this says something about me. But the the the aspects of Scrooge I identify with are all of his vices and caprices, and his grumpiness and his commudgeonliness, and his sense of being put upon and left out and betrayed in love and um and then later I relate to his joy and his euphoria, and I see it as the flip side of the coin. But yeah, Trot Trotty Veckinberchimes is not an everyman. He's um he's he's grotesque, and he he kind of stays within that grotesque outline, to me at least. Even though I suppose on the surface he's more humanised by his narrative in a way than Scrooge.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

It's quite hard to articulate, I haven't thought about it much. But um yeah. I remember us talking about the chimes of two of us years ago, and you describing it as uh the difficult second album.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Oh, oh, it was it it was a great friend of mine who came to see me read for chimes in my in my first year of the Dickens Museum, and he said it, and I thought that's brilliant. That's one of the best bits of criticism I've ever heard. Um yeah, I also refer I also refer to it as the mean-spirited version of It's a Wonderful Life. Um and I think I think the fact that it does feel a very mean-spirited and therefore I think quintessentially Victorian tale. I think I think it's for that reason, but it is again quite alienating.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

So for you, James, performing Sykes and Nancy in your early in your early twenties, you uh obviously didn't tear yourself to pieces, but how how did you how did you perform it? What was what was the effect on you playing that story live in front of an audience?

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Well, I I I should start off in a way by asking you first, Omnik, how did you find doing it? Because you've done it on a couple of occasions, haven't you?

SPEAKER_00 24:05

I feel a strange mixture about it actually. Of all of them, it's the one I'm most frightened of. And the reason I suppose I'm frightened of it is because of how aware we are today and how sensitive we are rightly about male violence against women, you know. And when I filmed it for the Dickens Museum, at that time there were various things happening in the news in a very big, high-profile way, and it just it made me doubt whether or not I should do it. And then having done it, I was really glad that I did, because it's so deeply profound and moving. It's one of the most I had an episode on Oliver Twist with Emily Bell a few episodes back, and and she and she agreed as well that that actually that Sykes and that whole Sykes and Nancy section is as powerful as anything Dickens wrote, and as profound and as true as anything Dickens wrote. So I think when it has that underneath, I think um yeah, I think it's timeless in in one sense. It's very hard to know. Um it feels just very quickly, since I'm supposed to be asking you the questions, but I'm just quickly saying that. Edward Bond writes really well about violence in theatre and about how over during his career people had said to him, Oh, why do you have these horrible violent scenes in your in your dramas? You know, even to the point of they kind of say, What right have you to do that? And he said, Well, as a dramatist wanting to write anything meaningful, what right have I not to? And I think it's that, and I felt you can translate that into the acting that you know you you do you do fun, light, frothy stuff, but if you really, really want to I don't know, I I feel as though there's something so important and profound in its in its message and what and what it says that that kind of carries it. But it is an interesting thing. I suppose that the challenge really, and I don't know what you felt about this, is where to go hot and where to go cold. Because it's in it's incredibly tender and poignant in places as well, isn't it? It's not just a kind of uh a thrash fest of blood and gore all the time. Yeah. Is anything anything out of that word salad useful for you to pick up on?

SPEAKER_01 26:07

No, no, lots of very useful points for um I I don't think I ever mastered Sykes and Nancy, and it's really annoying to me, and maybe I will return to it one day. But I I I share your terror about the piece. Um it is partly, you say, a fear with with regards for content, but I think I think just technically for me as an actor I I had the strange experience which I've never really had since of finding it harder to do as time went on. Um because it came about very haphazardly when I first did it. I I did it in my last week at university, determined to, you know, go out with something I really wanted to do. But um it was thrown together so so quickly. I rehearsed it in about six days. I'd had a bit longer to learn the lines. But I was doing three other plays simultaneously, because there was a thing called May Week, um at the end of every academic year at Cambridge, where traditionally lots and lots of plays went on. And I thought, well, I'm just gonna nail my colours to my mast and just do all the acting I humanly can. So I think paradoxically, that put me in a situation where I just did it. I just went on and I did it, and I didn't overthink it. And that was when it was easy to do, the first few times I did it. Um I le I later did it as a showcase after leaving university, because I had garnered absolutely no interest from any agents when uh you know I'd done a showcase at the end of university, so I was like, right, I'm gonna do my own. So so I I hired what was then the Tristan Bates Theatre in um London and did a one-off and The Actors Centre. Yeah, yeah, and um very, very luckily managed to get an agent. Um I think I invited a hundred agents, I think two turned up and one took me on, and you know, it's these uh tiny tiny slices of chances that you deal with as an actor. But um Yeah, it later became a touring thing, and it it it did go to the West End, you know, I I was so young, I was I was twenty-three, and um I I I just think looking back that the pressure was too much for me. Because one of the peculiarities about Sykes and Nancy, and it's something that's hung on in a lot of my Dickensian performances, and it hasn't really been by choice at any stage, it's just sort of happened, is I didn't have a director, I was self-directing. And looking back, I could really have done with someone to identify for me precisely what you were talking about, where to go cooler, where to go hotter. Because I think the longer I played it, the more wild it got. And it it sort of became that thing where you were not performing a sort of pure version of the text, you were kind of performing an accrued version of the text. It was the text plus all of the other performances you were giving were what I wound up so all sorry, all the other performances you were given in the past were what I wound up going on stage with. So it sort of became heavier and more difficult, and um I I did get really, really frightened of it. Um though I do wonder how much of this is just ingrained in the text. Because I think the way it's constructed really, you know, from the moment Bill Sykes enters, there are very, very few places as an actor where you can gather yourself if you actually want to embody that story. I think from the moment Bill Sykes enters, which is about halfway through, you don't really have any point at which you can regather your energies. And it all builds up, of course, to the great dark art of the piece, which still scares me whenever I think about it, where you as the solo show performer are stood on stage and it's the murder of Nancy. So you are simultaneously the murder victim, which is horrifying and Nancy's monologue where she pleads with Bill Sykes is so affecting and so distressing. But then on top of that, you are almost simultaneously, or actually simultaneously, I'm not sure, the murderer. You are Bill Sykes, you are that force of pure anger and rage and uncontrolled animal aggression. And I I always found it quite hard not to do that with in in a sort of frenzy of demonic glee. You know, it's like for all that's happened, it can still get worse, and this is happening now, it's horrifying, we're killing the dog, there we are. It's sort of the narrator saying In this part of the Dickens universe, there is no God, there is no hope. There we are. When when we were at Trevelka Studios, we repurposed the blood left over from James McAvoy's production of Macbeth. Um, but by the end, um it was a sort of monochrome production up until the point of the murder. And by the end, I was soaked from head to toe in blood. And foaming up the mouth and probably streaming from the nose and all of the other terrible, messy things that happen to actors when they're on stage and they can't go off and have a glass of water.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

I've written down in big letters here, James, Irving. Ah, right. We've not talked about him. What's tell us about Irving, tell us about Irving.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Um I suppose I can introduce Irving in relation to Dickens, because there are a couple of crossovers. I mean, he is for me, along with Dickens, my great sadly dead Victorian hero, um, where drama is concerned. And he he interestingly kind of counterbalances Dickens, in fact, Dickens and this is sometimes forgotten in discussions of Dickens, but Dickens, of course, was not only early Victorian, but he was pre-Victorian. Um, in the same way that the vast majority of the Pickwick papers was serialised before Queen Victoria came to the throne. Um I had a professor at university um who was, you know, if we ever wrote the word Victorian in an essay, would just circle it in red pen and say, What do you mean? We always had to write nineteenth century because um It i it is a bit weird, isn't it, as a shorthand, that we say Victorian, as though this thing which happened in this year which coincides with Queen Victoria's reign, is kind of imbued with the spirit of that particular queen. You know, I'm sure we'd feel just as strange if we started to be referred to as Elizabethans based on what we did when Queen Elizabeth II was on the throne. It's it's it's an odd thing.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

But um And also it's sixty percent. It's sixty percent of the nineteenth century, roughly, isn't it, for Queen Victoria. Yes, thirty-eight years before she takes the throne.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

Yeah. So so so Dickens was pre-Victorian and then early to mid-Victorian, whereas Irving

Solo Performances

SPEAKER_01 33:24

was mid-Victorian to post-Victorian. He uh he died in nineteen oh five, and Dickens was born in eighteen twelve, I think. We do have at least one documented case of Dickens seeing Irving act in the theatre. And this was before Irving had become preeminent. This was before he performed the Bells and became almost overnight recognised as the head of his profession. There's a there's a story about Dickens with a friend watching a pre-stardom Irving on stage, and this friend turned to Dickens and said If I know anything about acting, I think that young man is probably going to be a great actor one day. And Dickens turned to this friend and said, He's already a great actor. So I have to believe there's some sort of imaginative or creative sympathy between these two actors. And I mean there's there's there's another point of coincidence in that they both had very difficult relationships with their wives, which terminated in a complete well well, a cutting off. You know, there's a terrible story about Irving, which for years and years was told in in in in a fashion that seemed to be saying this was a good thing, maybe because it chimed with the Victorian work ethic, where they were riding back home in the carriage after he'd become preeminent on the night he did the bells for the first time for an audience, and she turned to him and said, Are you going to go on making a fool of yourself like this all your life? And he signalled for the carriage to be stopped, he opened the door, he got out. He never spoke to her again. And he he he really never spoke to her again. Um they they had a weird ongoing thing where she would come to the first nights at the theatre and sit in a box and she would be seen by everyone in the theatre as Lady Irving, but they never spoke again.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

And Dickens and Irvine both had mistresses called Ellen, didn't they?

SPEAKER_01 35:37

Yeah, this is this is very true. Very, very true. Very, very, very true. Your show Irving Under.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

How how do what were the steps then that led you to put that together?

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Oh gosh, very, very complicated and draw drawn over a long period of time. Um I think the seeds were planted when I was talking to Simon Callow, actually, who um it was really the first kind of long conversation I ever had with Simon, and um he he he gave me some really interesting things in that chat, which was he he he he he did a wonderful eloquent thing which was to kind of distill my mission as an actor for me, in in in a phrase, which was you know, he he just sort of said, I I I sort of sense a fru line in what you're doing, and then i you you you seem to be very interested in in probing the soul of the monster. And I think that's true. I think I think that gets to the heart of a lot of what I do, and it was it was very edifying to have, you know, my my great acting hero um voice that. It was um it was it was a real vote of confidence. But it was it it was also in this meeting where he said um James I think I think you get a lot out of researching Irving, and if if you don't mind me saying so, you look a bit like him. So you might even want to do a show about him. So I thought, right, well, I definitely have to do this fanatic. Um I I I had read uh I had read a biography of Bram Stoker, I think, the year before, and had an awful lot of information about Irving, which um I had found stimulating, but um I I I really went into a research hole at that point and um was was Irving, sorry to just cut in, but was Irving was he the inspiration for the character of Dracula or one of them for for for Stoker, is that right? It's um probably the thing for which Irving is now best known, which is um something Irving would be very displeased by, I'm sure. Um given he had absolutely no interest in playing Dracula on stage, despite Ram Stoker pestering him to do so. Uh it's difficult. I I don't think I can say with 100% confidence that Dracula is Irving and Irving is Dracula. Um Yeah, it's um I think it makes for a nice biographical frippery to say that they are one and the same, but um I think I think the theory I find most plausible is that Ramstoker's Dracula is actually a reaction to Henry Irving playing Macbeth. There are all sorts of points of interrelation between Macbeth and Dracula which aren't particularly spoken about, but you know, they're both gloomy dramas about dark castles,

Acting Experiences and Comparisons

SPEAKER_01 38:27

and you know, there are little you know, there's a great emphasis on blood, of course, and um um blood being a kind of life force, and you know, there are even little things like the Weird Sisters, they're free of them, and Dracula's free wives, and you know, you you you can go quite far with the Dracula Macbeth imaginative landscape comparison, I suppose. But um if if if you look at pictures of Henry Irving in the part of Macbeth, that is Bramstoker's Dracula. It's the old man with the long mustache and the grey hair. Um I think Ellen Terry compared Irving to a famished wolf when he played Macbeth, and he does have that hungry sort of feral quality to him. Um so I think I think yeah, Dracula is sort of Irving, but sort of Macbeth, and maybe sort of Irving as Metistopheles in Faust, which was another of his great parts, and as for supernatural quality, but um Yeah, so so I mean I mean with with regards the Dracula myth as all of its fascination with Irving. But the thing for me that I really came to realise is that which I find I I I find and found most interesting with Irving is pretty well what I find most fascinating about Dickens as an actor, which again goes back to that spirit of melodrama. Um what Henry Irving was able to achieve in a play like The Bells, which if you read it today is pretty flimsy stuff. You sort of look at it and you think this is so preposterous and so thin. How on earth did this actor, this this incredibly strange actor by the way, who had come from nothing? You know, this odd little boy from Somerset, who had a speech impediment and a foot that dragged behind him when he walked when he was young, and who had all these layers of social awkwardness and you know, how on earth did he stand on a stage in a massive theatre with almost nothing to go on linguistically, and make his audience fear for their very souls? This is what he did with the bells, and there are too many accounts of this happening for it to be an accident. People felt the angel of death was in the theatre when they saw Henry Irving die as Matthias in Mabell's. He has this incredibly baroque demise where he's dreamed up this courtroom as he lies in sleep, which has discovered that he has murdered this Polish Jew and run off with all of his money. And the court sentences him to hang by the neck until he be dead. And in reaction to this, Matthias collapses from the bed, groping at his neck, crying, Take the rope from my neck, take the rope from my neck, and expires from guilt. And Irving did actually seem to die. Um And this this so I mean I I I find it so exciting and you know what I wouldn't give to be able to be in that theatre and just just experience that and try and figure out on some level quite what he was unleashing, what he was getting at with all of that. But of course it takes me back to Sykes and Nancy and um You know, the Dickens was essentially doing the same thing with the death of Nancy. People really did think they were seeing someone being brutally murdered in front of them. And what they were actually seeing on a on on a rational level was a man in evening dress in front of some red velvet screens with a drinking glass on a desk in front of him, just sort of pounding at it with his hand and you know, shouting in a voice which was not his own. But it's again that belief that slightly diabolical and frightening force of belief which carried his audiences along with him. And and both Dickens and Irving, I think, ended up shortening their lives in their commitment to doing that. Irving was doing what Edmund Keane had d his great forebear as the head of the English acting profession. He was he was going out and essentially dying in front of his audiences towards the end of his career. Um he had a heart ailment, and he he performed for Bell's for the last time, the night before he died, and actually collapsed when when the curtain fell. Because it put such strain on him and he wasn't able to carry on doing it. Um, you know, in the same way Dickens was having strokes around the time he was playing Sykes and Nancy, having done Sykes and Nancy myself when I was in my early twenties, usually in studio theatres, not having to project to two thousand people as Dickens did on a routine basis. And not just doing Sykes and Nancy either, doing a piece before and a piece after. How he was able to do that in his mid to late fifties, having not drinking a pint of champagne as well or something.

SPEAKER_00 43:59

I mean, and with raw egg or something.

SPEAKER_01 44:02

And and also having not had decades on the stage figuring out a sustainable technique for shouting and screaming, which is never that sustainable, as we actors know. You know, you have to be very, very careful, even if you're doing all the right things. How he did that, I cannot for the life of me imagine. The only answer is he had a demon in him. You know, that that sounds like a joke, but I cannot come up with a better explanation. There was something diabolical in Dickens as there was in Irving, I believe. You know, as I say, what what what I would give to be in an auditorium feeling that black magic and uh you know fearing for my soul as the Victorians did.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

Gosh. James, this has been so brilliant. This has been a very heartening conversation.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

It's so lovely to talk to a a kindred spirit and a f and a fellow solo Dickens performer and Well, thank you enormously, Dominic, because you know, you've you've you've always been very, very encouraging to me, and um there there was no reason you should have been so, because when when I first appeared at the Dickens Museum, I was rather nervous, I was treading on your toes a bit, and um the fact you have always been so welcoming

Acting Journey and Dickensian Characters

SPEAKER_01 45:14

and so encouraging and so generous has been Well, not at all. I've you know, very very much appreciated by me. Well, that's very kind. Without naming any names, I've met certain solo performers who are mad and they hate other solo performers. And um, you know, I'm I'm very, very glad you see us as part of the same continuum. I was gonna say almost part of the human race.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

I think we are both just about just about with trying. But I mean, you know, at the Dickens Museum, um Simon Callow's a patron, isn't he? And I don't know if this is the same for you, but one of the reasons I even embarked on doing any solo Dickens was seeing his mystery of Charles Dickens.

SPEAKER_01 45:50

Yes. I mean I mean for me it was on for for me it was on DVD. Um and then I saw it live a long time later when he revived it for um the by the bicentenary of Dickens' birth, I think, in 2012. But um yeah, that that was a massive, massive influence to me.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

Yeah, it was great, wasn't it? But no, no, bless you, and I have really enjoyed catching up with you again. And um we should catch up at some point in person, shouldn't we? That'd be really fun. I'd like that one. Some to grab a coffee or see you in some of the things. It'll be lovely. It'll be lovely. I'd be very much up for that.

SPEAKER_01 46:25

Oh, great. Well, maybe something more Dekensing, maybe some smoking bishop or something of that nature. Still not tried. We ought to do that. That's a bucketless goal for a bucket of smoking bishop.