Thomas Gough is Scrooge (but he's acting)
29 Nov 2018.

by Drew Rowsome -

Theatre-goers will already have been treated to a Thomas Gough performance, the actor has had many roles in may productions including Donors, Bent and The Crucible. Casting Gough as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol is a clever idea: Gough likes to present himself on social media as a curmudgeon but there is a contradictory comic sensibility bubbling underneath. I had the good fortune to interview Gough in person and was impressed by not only his fierce intelligence, dedication to his craft, mellifluous voice, and the twinkle in his eye that belied his more serious or self-effacing statements.

Due to unfortunate time constraints on both sides, this interview was conducted by email. Reflecting his status as a retired teacher - education's loss was theatre's gain - his answers were complete, grammatically impeccable, and fascinating with a very moving analysis of the Christmas spirit that should be required reading for Scrooges, Grinchs and assorted political and cultural figures. As such, I have done little to no editing, finding it best to let the thespian speak for himself. 

Drew Rowsome: A Christmas Carol is so ubiquitous in the zeitgeist this time of year, what fresh take is this production bringing to the classic tale?

Thomas Gough: This is difficult for me to answer, because I know no other version of the story except the book. I understand, however, that some versions have been melodramatic and over-acted. I haven't actually asked the producers about this, but I think they'll agree with me when I say that we want this to be a believable story about real people. Dickens has a message for real people in A Christmas Carol, and Justin Haigh's script preserves it.

I think also that the setting will bring a great deal to this production. Campbell House was built when Dickens was about ten years old, so it's a house that some of the more prosperous characters in this story might have lived in. The intimacy of the space and the size of the audience - no more than twenty-eight per show - allow the actors to feel that they're in their own houses talking to their own friends and neighbours. And we hope that audience-members will feel the same: that they're guests in a real house where an interesting family drama is being played out.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a role that has been done many times - from Alastair Sim, Patrick Stewart and Simon Callow to Bill Murray, even Roseanne and Jim Carrey. How do you clear the clutter to create your own interpretation? Is there a version that you are particularly fond of?

Thomas Gough: I'm beginning to feel that I ought to be embarrassed by this question. I read the book about thirty years ago, but I've never seen any acted version, on stage or on screen, famous or obscure. This argues a lamentable degree of cultural illiteracy on my part, but for me as an actor it's a good thing, because I don't want other actors' work getting in the way. Working out how to present a coherent believable character is already complicated, and having ineradicable visions of someone else's work - good or bad - on the same project just adds to the difficulty. So I'm happy to say that I don't have any clutter to clear.

Immersive theatre is a sometimes great adventure and the Campbell House is a great venue (I've seen multiple productions there). How do you adjust from a proscenium to being so close to an audience? What are the challenges and rewards?

Thomas Gough: I love being that close to the audience. I find that the necessary adjustments are generally simplifications. You can forget about reaching the back of the auditorium with your voice, you can forget about exaggerating gestures and facial expressions, and you can achieve a much greater subtlety, a greater range of fine nuance, than you can when the audience is, at its nearest, fifteen or twenty feet away. So the great reward is that performance feels so natural in such a setting.

The challenge, of course, is that it's much harder to hide your mistakes; everything is audible; everything is visible. It can also be difficult to avoid occasionally making eye-contact with a member of the audience, or to avoid identifying particular people in the audience. This doesn't cause me a lot of trouble, but it makes some actors very nervous. You're really exposed. And, of course, one doesn't expect every member of the audience to have an actor's sense of spatial relationships, so there's often someone who doesn't realize that standing in a doorway is probably not a good idea, or something like that. But we know those things will happen, and we work around them.

Do you get inspiration from also being immersed in an environment instead of a set?

Thomas Gough: Certainly, and especially so as I am by now very familiar with Campbell House, as this is my third or fourth production there. The staff there are wonderfully welcoming and endlessly accommodating, which makes everything comfortable right from the start. There's a clear sense that they actually like having us there. I'm very sensitive to my physical surroundings. Badly-proportioned rooms painted
in ugly colours, with no woodwork, no books, and no windows (which ought to be illegal) depress me. Most of the people who build schools should be shot for the lasting damage they do to the aesthetic sensibilities of the young. But Campbell House is a graceful building, built when architects still remembered things like Golden Proportion, so it's a very comfortable place to work in. I find it very easy to think myself into character in such a setting.

There's also a much more personal attraction for me. When Campbell House was built the population of York was still well under 2,000, and the self-appointed leaders would all have known each other. Two of my great-great-great grandfathers and the father-in-law of one of them were members of the mafia - I beg your pardon, I mean the Family Compact - and would have known Sir William Campbell, and would almost certainly have dined in his house. So I have in an odd way a real sense of belonging there.

What is the most fun aspect of playing Scrooge? The most difficult?

Thomas Gough: The most fun is working with all these wonderful people. Quite apart from the enormous talent in this group, I've felt at home with them all from the first day. The most difficult part, which is also great fun - there's not a lot of point, for me as an actor, in working on something that isn't difficult - is working out the transition from Scrooge at the beginning of the story to Scrooge at the end of the story. It's easy to transform him from one one-dimensional character into a miraculously altered second one-dimensional character, but we don't want this to be melodrama. Scrooge's transformation has to be believable, and because it's so complete and takes place in such a short time, it's a challenge allowing the stages of change to be seen. Justin Haigh's script gives opportunity for the transition to be made in palpable stages, and Sarah Thorpe's sensitive and articulate perceptions are tremendously helpful here. Sarah has already pointed out numerous things about Scrooge that I'd never have seen
on my own.

The most unpleasant part, so far, has been nearly breaking Christopher Fowler's nose in rehearsal. He was incredibly sweet and forgiving about it, but I'd really hurt him. I did not enjoy that moment at all.

Do you normally listen to ghosts? Fear them?

Thomas Gough: This is a tough question to answer, partly because I take it seriously. I've never encountered a ghost of the demonic-howling-and-clanking-chains school, and I'm not certain that I've ever encountered a ghost at all. But I am an almost entirely intuitive performer and I rarely know where my ideas come from. Are they deliberately planted in my head by some mysterious external intelligence? I don't know. But I do have a favourite daydream about it. One of the senior members of Shakespeare's company, Robert Goughe, had the same name as my father. Gough is a common name in England, so it's not likely that there's any connexion, but I'd love to think that Shakepeare's Goughe whispers to me in my sleep sometimes.Possibly I'm just terribly confused.

You describe A Christmas Carol as "ridiculously heart-warming." Will it infuse the audience with the spirit of Christmas? How does it avoid being saccharine at this the most cynical time of year for many of us?

Thomas Gough: Well, if the spirit of Christmas is a spirit of generosity and community, I hope it will. You'd have to be completely heartless not to delight in the end of this story. You might think it's contrived or deliberately sentimental or too good to be true, but only a monster could oppose it. We're doing our best not to be saccharine, but to evoke the real sweetness that lies at the bottom of the story. You will find it very difficult not to be charmed by Makenna Beatty and Chloë Bradt, who are sharing the role of Tim. And William Matthews is a heart-breakingly sad and defeated but endlessly kind and loving Bob Cratchit. He's really making me feel Scrooge's cruelty before the happy ending, and I hope the audience will have the same feeling.

How do we avoid being saccharine? Well, maybe we won't. Maybe we'll fail. But we do it, if we're successful, by doing what actors always do. We look for truth in the fiction we're playing. And I'm afraid that's as far as I can go; I don't know how to explain how an actor expresses the truth found in fiction. It's the essential mystery of acting, and I don't know how it works. But if our production does infuse that spirit in a few people; if a few people are a little kinder, a little gentler, a little quieter, a little happier after seeing this show, even for a very short time, then we will have found the truth and conveyed it adequately.

A Christmas Carol has a very blunt message but, despite so many productions and variations, we still have rampant greed and inequality this time of year and all year. Who would you like to send three ghosts to?

Thomas Gough: Where do I start?

I think I'd like to send them to a certain big businessman who "can't afford" to pay his employees a living wage, and to the others of his kind. And if I were the employer of the ghosts they'd be run off their spectral feet visiting self-serving political figures who lie to their followers in order to sustain their own destructive power. Perhaps I'd benefit from their visits myself.

The creatives feature a musical director, Pratik Gandhi, will there be song and dance? Knowing you are a classical music aficionado, will we finally get to hear you sing?

Thomas Gough: There will be song and dance. We learnt the first song a couple of days ago, and I thought the cast picked it up very quickly and sounded very good within about fifteen minutes. But you don't want to hear me sing. While I am addicted to music, I have absolutely no musical ability of any kind. If you've ever heard an elderly crow with a fishbone stuck in its throat angrily denouncing the Corn Laws or something, you've heard me sing. It's not an experience anyone wants to have twice.

Sarah Thorpe and Justin Haigh (Circle Jerk) have done a lot of interesting work over the years. How did you come to be involved with this production?

Thomas Gough: I've worked with Sarah and Justin before; the first Soup Can show I did was Antigone, in the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2012. I'm also scheduled to be Lear in their production of Edward Bond's Lear as soon as the funding is in place. Sarah invited me to be Scrooge, which is flattering and a great pleasure, because the whole Soup Can gang are tremendous fun: smart, sweet-tempered, funny, talented people. They are also sufficiently widely admired that they attract good actors. There was a day-long parade of exciting talent through the drawing-room at Campbell House, where the auditions were held. I'd already been cast so I was able to read with the auditioners and I'm glad I didn't have to do the choosing. It must have been very difficult.

What would your Christmas message to the world be? Ebenezer's?

Thomas Gough: I think my own message would be "Calm down, people, for Heaven's sake! It's really not necessary to get so excited about everything."

Our rather battered species has many problems, most of its own making; we really won't get them solved by running around in circles screaming at each other. And I have to say I get very tired of people with grand schemes for fixing everything at once. I think it is a very rare person who can do more than keep his or her own backyard clean, and perhaps help a bit from time to time with someone else's. Unfortunately the big seemingly insoluble problems attract most of our attention because we can have a lovely time going to meetings and feeling superior and raising money and being in Parliament and expounding our ideologies and telling everybody the one sure-fire solution and so on. Whereas the solution to the mess in your own backyard is often obvious, so you actually have to do it. And no one wants that. So I would say clean up your own backyard and make your own apologies and accept your own responsibilities before you start trying to bring Heaven down to earth. Cleaning up our own mess is more than enough of a challenge for most of us.

But at this time of year I would say especially: take some time to enjoy your life. Pour yourself a glass of wine and really savour it. Read a story to an enchanted child. Cuddle the dog that adores you. Make love to the person who still wants you to. Spend an entire afternoon soaking yourself in music that really makes you feel something. Pay attention, even if it's only for a while, to all the wonderful people around you, to all the magical phenomena of our existence. Human life is not a contest. It really isn't.

And I think Scrooge's message is clear and obvious: as long as you're still breathing, there's time to fix things. But only as long as you're still breathing, and no longer.