INTERVIEW: Comedy icon, Exeter fan, grandad and currently a dazzling Scrooge at the RSC, Adrian Edmondson is in a thoughtful mood...
Interviewing a famous actor in the RSC’s bustling green room-cum-cafe while a World Cup footie match is in nail-biting action is among Herald Arts’ more challenging (and pleasurable) experiences.
I’ve been waiting for the star for a short while, nursing a cappuccino and staring at the big screen as Croatia and Brazil battle it out. It’s a cold night outside but inside it’s warm and steamy. There’s lots of chatter from the cast and crew dotted about as they holler and cheer as the game heads towards the dreaded penalty shoot-out and time ticks down for their own show’s curtain up.
Adrian is a football fan – an Exeter season ticket-holder no less – but he’s not a fan of the tea he’s just been served. He has a bah-humbug moment as he plops the teabag back in the hot water and fetches some more milk…
When Adrian was here playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night five Christmasses ago I talked to him then for the Herald too, and during lockdown he wrote a lovely piece for us about how he’d been spending his time.
He’s a thoughtful conversationalist, intelligent and serious but also wryly amused by much of life.
Between pauses to remark on the World Cup action – and various footballers’ haircuts and penalty technique – this is how our conversation went…
How is it to be back in Stratford?
It’s very pleasant being at the RSC, it’s a bit like being back at college – I’m in one of the actors’ cottages 30 seconds from the theatre and we all live here and it’s all very jolly and sociable.
A lot of the time when you do theatre in London people are getting trains back to Brighton – and no one’s up for a get-together. Whereas here we have a WhatsApp group and someone will share a picture of a duck and then we go down to the pub [the Dirty Duck].
I like a pub that doesn’t have a knife and fork on every table, and it’s still got a nice room.
Director Rachel Kavanaugh said she thought about you playing Scrooge ahead of the 2017 production…
The conversation wasn’t with me directly – there was a thought about the same actor playing both parts. When I was playing Malvolio, Phil [Davis who played Scrooge] and I shared a dressing room, so you could see how it could work. So then they thought it was too much work for one person. The Dickens role is so big, Malvolio is quite small.
When did Rachel officially sound you out?
Sometime in early summer this year.
I remember when I saw it all those years ago, in 2017, and thinking what a brilliant show it was and I remember thinking I was in the wrong show.
Because Twelfth Night is alright, but it’s a bit twee. It’s a weird play: it’s a play about bullying that doesn’t get resolved; it’s not quite a love story, it’s confusing and not very well written.
So you thought you’d rather be in A Christmas Carol?
It’s kind of more relevant.
After seeing Phil Davis as Scrooge (in 2017) did you think how can you make this role yours? And how adaptable a part is it?
Well Phil made his choices and I made mine. Like all actors watching any other actor I thought about how I would do it differently. His was much more internalised and much more kind of Freudian whereas mine’s more externalised, but that’s just the kind of person I am.
I think Scrooge is slightly misunderstood. He’s a brilliant businessman and he enjoys it, and he has fun. For example in this script in particular with Mrs Baldock, teasing about her debt. He’s not a humourless man; but he’s a man without any love or consideration of his fellow human beings.
There’s a lot of Scrooges about still.
He’s a very recognisable character. Today there’s a lot of people that work in the city that are like this – they are very good business people and very shrewd.
Rees-Mogg made that statement recently in parliament about holidays shouldn’t be a God-given right: “It is very hard to believe that the right to paid holiday is an absolute moral right.”
That’s exactly one of the lines in the play! These people exist – they are into leverage and hedge funds and financial things we don’t understand – which is basically taking more than their fair share.
Scrooge is quite often a cartoony character – sometimes simplified – do you think people think about the broader implications of what Dickens was saying?
It’s funny how the word Scrooge-like means to be the first version of Scrooge rather than the second version where he’s a very nice person – it doesn’t reference redemption, and that he saw the path.
Your name carries weight – and when it was announced you were in A Christmas Carol ticket sales went through the roof, how did that feel?
That’s very nice, it doesn’t always happen – I think it depends on the thing. I think people could see me as Scrooge. My kids [Adrian has three grown up daughters with wife Jennifer Saunders] could see me as Scrooge – they were like ‘oh you would make a brilliant Scrooge!’. I’m still not sure if it was meant as a compliment or not.
Your Scrooge has a great range of facial expressions, and people will perhaps see glimpses of your well-known comic characters – Vyvyan from The Young Ones and Eddie from Bottom…
I don’t bother with any of my past – they come out of me and this comes out of me and there are bound to be similarities. They are all going to look and sound like me – and my face moves in certain ways and sometimes it might be that it reminds people of something else. But there’s no conscious ‘oh this needs a bit of Vyvyan’.
Each night when you become Scrooge is there a transformative moment, a mindset you have to click into?
Yes, there’s an A4 sheet on my mirror, a print out that says ‘He’s a bastard’ [chuckles].
The trouble with the script and the book is that he is taken on a journey and sees things and occasionally almost gets it – and you can go too soft too soon. The sign is just to remind me that especially those first 20 pages he’s an absolute bastard. And each time he has a little prodding and understanding, just to bring him back and make him a bastard. It’s very hard to change, and it can’t happen too quickly.
It may sound a bit cliché, but the meaning of Dickens’ story feels particularly relevant. We are in relatively affluent Stratford but the foodbanks are busy and people are facing hardship…
It is shocking. I mean there were foodbanks five years ago when the RSC first did this. But there must be 300 times more – and because of Covid and another financial crash – people seem to be in very desperate straits in a very affluent country. I thought one of the shocking things about Covid was how easy it was to pay everyone – I know it’s racking up debt… But money is a figment of the financial system, money is just a lot of noughts, it’s not backed up by anything, it’s just a load of promises. During lockdown we were able to allow people not to do any work and for us all to live – which is what we should be heading to.
In the 1930s the economist Keynes predicted that by the late-90s that we’d all be doing a 15-hour working week and having to really think about our leisure – and we could be, it’s just some people want to take more than their share.
The whole Truss thing of paying the rich more to make the poor richer…
Yes that trickle down economics has never worked. It has only ever trickled up.
Does being in A Christmas Carol make you more political? Do social injustices rankle with you ever greater?
It makes it much clearer. If you go to work every day and you think about poverty and how needless it is then you are bound to become more entrenched in that position.
What do you think people who are coming to see the production get from it?
I’m not sure what people get from it. But there’s a cheer I get when I go for a solo bow at the end, and it’s a very particular cheer, not one I’ve had before. I think it’s people cheering the idea of themselves being better people – they are recognising that within that morass of inhumanity some of it pertains to them.
Some of them laugh at the joke of the beginning: ‘What’s Christmastime to you other than spending money you don’t have on people you don’t like and calling it festivity?’ – I think those people get their comeuppance at the end, and think ‘you know I could be nicer, I could put more in the foodbank more in the collection tins – I could knock on the elderly neighbour’s door’. I don’t know, maybe that is just wishful thinking – but it is based on that cheer and I don’t think that is entirely for me, I think it’s for the idea we could be better people.
There is a new zeitgeisty phrase being bandied about: ‘Goblin mode’ – people looking out for themselves and being greedy. It’s like we haven’t made progress since Dickens wrote this in 1843.
I think we have made progress. I remember talking to Hilary Benn once when I was making a documentary for Comic Relief and I was saying pretty much what you’ve just said – that we haven’t progressed. And he said well think that 200 years ago no one had the vote, no one had the power to change things like we do now – it’s just people voting wrongly! And I know schools are strapped for cash but universal education is on offer.
I don’t want to get onto single issues, but generally I think everyone could be a f---ing lot nicer. And I hope they are waking up to the fact that our current misery goes back to being David Cameron’s fault for pandering to the extreme right wanting to leave the EU – and it’s all gone wrong since then and we’ve had a miserable time of it. It’s got worse and worse.
People who think Boris is funny – he is far from funny. I hope people now understand how much poorer they and everyone else is. And just because you have got a job doesn’t mean life gets any better for you. If there are loads of people without money it’s just going to be horrible everywhere.. the only way to make a nice world is for everyone to just be a bit kinder.
See Thursday's Herald for part two of our interview with Adrian.