Thomas Gough

Thomas Gough was first on stage at the age of five, but clearly remembers acting before that. He works frequently in the Independent Theatre in Toronto, having appeared in the last few years with the Alumnæ Theatre, Safeword, Single Thread, the Storefront, Thought For Food, Theatre Lab, Plain Stage, and Unspoken Theatre, as well as Theatre By The Bay (Barrie) and the Kick And Push Festival (Kingston). Most recently he appeared in the Toronto Fringe Festival (2018) as Lionel Percy in Bakersfield Mist, and as The Reporter in Teatron Toronto Jewish Theatre’s production of The Story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Thomas appears in The Three Ships Collective and Soup Can Theatre’s new and immersive adaptation of Dickens’ timeless holiday classic set in the historic Campbell House Museum!

Soup Can Theatre:
www.soupcantheatre.com
Twitter: @soupcantheatre
Instagram: soupcantheatre
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/soupcantheatre/

Tickets: https://christmascarolto.brownpapertickets.com/

Transcript

Welcome to episode 160 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

My life is kind of in chaos right now. I just finished moving to a new apartment and I don’t even have my podcasting space set up yet. I’ve been unpacking everything else that I need to live, but that doesn’t stop things.

The business of presenting podcasts goes on and so there is another episode this week. I will get to that in a second. Did you guys know that on January the 5th, Stageworthy will be three years old? That’s right, three years old.

Sometime this summer we will hit the 200th episode, but right now I’m happy to tell you that Stageworthy is three years old as of January 5th. There’s a whole lot to go back on. You can look back on some great episodes in the past and I’m super proud of all of them.

I always want to hear from people who enjoy the podcast, so if you feel like dropping me a line, remember you can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at StageworthyPod and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. If you want to drop me a line, I’m on Twitter and Instagram at philrickabee and my website is philrickabee.com. If you like the podcast, celebrate the three years of Stageworthy by telling a friend about it. Some of my favourite podcasts became my favourite because somebody I knew told me about them. It’s a great way to spread the love about podcasts that you enjoy.

While you’re telling people about it or if you want to help other people find it, make sure that you leave a comment and a rating on Apple Podcasts, Google Music, or wherever you get your podcasts because those ratings and comments do in fact help new people find the show. This week my guest is Thomas Gough who appears in Three Ships Collective and Soup Can Theatre’s A Christmas Carol on at the Campbell House Museum from December 12th to the 22nd in Toronto. So you’re working on Soup Can Theatre’s A Christmas Carol.

Yeah, you’re playing Ebenezer Scrooge. I am being Scrooge, yeah. So did you grow up on the Alastair Sim? Is it one of your… do you have a tradition around A Christmas Carol? No, really? Okay.

I never read A Christmas Carol until I was well into adulthood. I’d read a lot of other Dickens before that and I have never to this day seen a single acted version of it. Never seen any of the films? Nothing.

Well, you know what, in a way that’s perfect because so many of those performances are… it’s hard not to want to emulate that. Yeah. This is a really interesting thing and I was actually answering some questions about this for somebody else and the question of iconic performances came up.

I had one strange experience a number of years ago when I did a production of a Shakespeare play with a director who was terrific in a lot of ways but he’d never been an actor and he kept wanting us to watch clips of… Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, of course. No, no.

The last thing I want is to know what I have to live up to or what I have to try to get out my head. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

You know, obviously if I go wildly wrong that’s what I got a director for. Sure, yeah, yeah. It’s funny to be tied to that kind of thing but it does put you in a unique position not having been infected by iconic performances of which there have been many.

I’m sort of curious how you avoided it. I mean, it’s sort of like as you get closer and closer to the Christmas season it becomes almost impossible to avoid. Well, that’s… yeah.

I don’t watch much television. Okay. I haven’t watched television for a long time.

I didn’t grow up with television and I don’t tend to go to movies a lot either. Okay. And I think I miss a lot of things a lot yeah.

Sure. What was… I mean, now you’re… this production that Soup Can is doing is a little bit unique because it’s not in a theatre space. It’s at Campbell House.

Yeah. What makes that, the presentation of it in such an intimate space, more of a challenge? Well, ah, gee, I don’t know that it is more of a challenge for me as an actor. For the producers, well, there’s an obvious challenge for the producers, which is they can’t sell a lot of tickets because the spaces.

Oh, sure. Yeah. I think we’re having maximum audience of 28 per show.

Right. Okay. Yeah.

For me as an actor, it actually solves some problems. I remember the first time I did… I’ve done two other shows in the Campbell House and the first time I did one, it was with the Single Thread Theatre and it was a play about the history of Campbell House. Right.

And I discovered that I could do all kinds of vocal things, achieve all kinds of vocal subtleties and so on because I was in such a small space. Sure. Yeah.

And I also found in Campbell House and in Spadina House, where I’ve done a couple of shows, that as a performer, it feels much more casual and not casual in the sense of lazy or sloppy, but in the sense of natural. Sure. Yeah.

Some guests are here listening to your conversation, but it’s just, you know, you’re sitting in a comfortable chair in a nice room. I guess because you don’t have to worry about projecting. You don’t have to worry about projecting and you do still have to know where you’re moving and that sort of thing, but the audience is so close.

Well, the audience is, I mean, literally inside the fourth wall. Yeah. And they can see and they can hear.

And I don’t find that I’m any more distracted by the audience than I am in a theatre. I suppose they’re close enough to see and hear everything you do wrong, but, you know, you try not to do anything. Well, that’s the thing, right? That’s the thing.

Yeah. There’s a lot of historical references in A Christmas Carol. There’s things that are mentioned so casually that would have been obvious to a Victorian audience that are very obscure to us.

And we only recognize them by virtue of the fact that some of us have seen the movie or whatever and heard the references every year, but they don’t, they don’t register. And we’ll talk about that in Shakespeare. Sure.

Sure. Yeah. There’s a lot of, about the poor and the treatment of the poor and certain laws that were in effect at the time and things like that, that were dear to Dickens’ heart, but are removed from us.

Was there a lot of research that went into preparing to do this? On my part? No. On the part of Justin Higg, who has extracted this version of the story from the book? Yes, definitely. He’s clearly done his homework.

We’ve been talking about things like the poor houses and the poor house system and the workhouse system, which was all, you know, we look back at that now and we think, oh, what a horrible, barbaric way to deal with this kind of problem. And yet we don’t seem to be handling it much better now. No, of course not.

No. So I don’t think there’s anything in this script that will confuse anybody who’s reasonably aware. Sure.

I suspect that a lot of people who will come to see this are people who are familiar with the story and love it and want to see a new version of it. So I don’t, I don’t think any, well, as you say, it’s difficult to get away from the story. So I don’t imagine a lot of people will be walking into a vacuum.

No, no. And we don’t customarily have talkbacks with audiences after shows like this, but I suppose we could always find an opportunity to let people ask questions. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. What is the, what’s sort of exciting you most about this particular story and this particular role? Well, the big thing for me always is to have to do something I’ve never done before. And I’ve never played a character who did such a complete about face because he becomes, well, he becomes, it’s a fundamental, he’s a very different person, obviously.

One of the interesting things about this, and Justin is giving a lot of help with his script, is making the transition from Scrooge at the beginning to Scrooge at the end. And it’s easy to see Scrooge as a, as a one dimensional character who suddenly turns into a totally different one dimensional character. But I don’t, I mean, that’s melodrama.

I don’t want to do that. So the, the, what’s really interesting to me, and we’re really, we’re just starting, is finding the moments at which there’s a little bit of a hint that maybe Scrooge is cracking, but not giving it away completely too early. Sure.

So it’s, it’s a very, very clear arc of character development, which, which makes it easier in some ways, you know exactly where you have to get to. Yeah. But because the change is so huge in the space of time, yes, that it has happened in is so small.

It’s, you know, how do I, how do I do it without being too obvious? Yeah. Yeah. How do I make sure that the audience gets the points, you know, that the audience can go back at the end and say, oh, that’s why he had that look on his face, you know, 15 pages ago.

Yeah. It’s super, I mean, it’s super interesting because I think a lot of people, you can see Scrooge as, as a one dimensional character that turns into one dimensional character, but he’s, um, he’s, he’s very human. He’s just reacted to his own life in a particular way.

And, and again, in Justin’s script, I don’t remember the book at all. It’s a long time since I read it, but in Justin’s script, it’s very clear. If you think about why he’s become the person he was, and what I’m hoping really is that people will see Scrooge as someone who not as someone who suddenly becomes a different person, but as someone who wakes up and rediscovers stuff that always used to be there.

Sure. Because, you know, I mean, in the story, he, he, in the book, he’s, and in the, in many of the movies, he’s, uh, he was once happy and celebrated the holidays and, you know, wasn’t the closed off person that he is. And we have, um, we have Scrooge at three different ages here.

We have the very small Scrooge and we have the young man who has a scene with the young woman he’s going to marry. And so we, we, we see why that doesn’t happen. Yeah.

Um, it’s, it’s always interesting to some extent, I suppose, futile when you’re dealing with real human beings speculating about what forms character. I think some of Scrooge is pretty obvious, but I, as, as an actor, I have to find some stuff, uh, in the character that isn’t necessarily in the script that possibly nobody but me knows anything about at all. You have to find reasons, um, for, for doing what, what the character does.

They may not be explained by the author. Yeah. Well, it’s always one of the, one of the interesting things about, about three dimensional people is we don’t have to explain and, and we don’t have to explain everything.

Yeah. You know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, we, we, we, we love to explain and, and, and make sure that everything is understood. And I think leaving things open for interpretation by an audience is a, is a real, a real, like you’re trusting your audience when you do that.

Absolutely. And, and the same thing goes, of course, for the, for the relationship between the director and the actor. I, I love working with Sarah because like all the good directors I’ve ever worked with, she trusts the actors.

She doesn’t say this is the way you have to do that. Yeah. She, she trusts us to make our own decisions and she, she always wants to hear what we’re thinking.

She wants to discuss things. So it really is a collaborative effort, but there’s, even so there are things that, that you don’t tell the director. Oh, sure.

How you’re getting to where you’re going. You don’t always have to tell them. No.

You don’t always have to tell them. If it’s working, they probably, you don’t have to, you don’t have to justify anything. Yeah.

And sometimes you don’t know yourself, of course. Yeah. I remember years ago, I did a production of, of, this was Hamlet at Hart House.

I did, I did Polonius and Hamlet just a few years ago, but this was the same play like eight years earlier than that. And I used a strange kind of voice for Polonius. And one of the kids at a high school talked back, said, well, where did that voice come from? And I said, I have no idea.

I was running lines in the bath one day or something. And I suddenly started talking in that voice. And somehow after that, that had to be the voice, but I don’t have no idea where it came from.

Yeah. Um, so sometimes you, you don’t know yourself and that’s, that, that’s a good thing to some degree. Yeah.

Um, I, I work with actors sometimes who are much more cerebral than I am. The kind of actor who can build a character brick by brick and know exactly what he’s doing, exactly where he’s going. I’m not like that at all.

I can’t do that. And to some extent, I’m very glad that the ideas come from, from who knows where, but it can be frustrating. Sure.

I have always found myself that, that, you know, there’s a, there’s a certain amount for me, you can be cerebral up to a point and then you have to just go with the gut. You have to trust. And I think, I think all actors have to do that to some degree, but I, I’m a really, really intuitive performer, partly because I have no training.

I mean, everything I’ve learned about acting, I learned by doing it with good people from whom I absorbed stuff. Yeah. But I’m a very intuitive person anyway.

And I, it seems to work, but again, it’s why I want to have a good director who can say, okay, you know, sorry, not this time. Um, I’m very much a detailed person and I don’t tend to see the big picture, which is another reason, you know, I may, I may play a scene in a particular way and the director may say, you know, that’s absolutely wonderful, but it’s totally inconsistent with everything else you’ve done. So let’s, let’s think about that.

But I mean, in a way that’s, I mean, that’s kind of your job is just to look at what’s in front of you right now. And that’s why you have a director so that they can help keep things consistent. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s the way I look at it. Thomas, what’s your, what’s your theatre origin story? How did you start doing this? Well, uh, I was first on stage when I was four or five, I think as the innkeeper in the kindergarten Christmas project.

Right. But I can, I was acting before that. I can remember as a small child playing little scenes.

And I had a sort of strange way of doing it. I, I would imagine myself as some character and I would start a conversation with somebody or ask a question or something. And it was always in the hope of getting them to react in some particular way.

But my goal was always to, to, to, to make a scene work out the way I wanted it to, without anybody knowing that I was playing a scene and being in a different character. It sounds kind of sociopathic, I guess, really, but it wasn’t at the time. It was just, it was a fun way of playing with words and telling stories and so on.

I think I was born acting basically. Yeah. I’ve always wanted to do it.

When I was a young man, I wanted to be a professional, but my health was bad and I just, I didn’t have the physical plan. I wasn’t confident that I had enough talent. I became a teacher and I spent 20 years teaching and I loved it.

For a while, it seemed to be enough. Yeah. What subjects did you teach? I taught history, English, philosophy and law.

I taught at a private school where they allowed you to teach the stuff you actually knew instead of saying, you have to teach six sections of grade nine math. Yeah. I loved it.

There were a lot of bright kids, really stimulating people. After a while, I started, I think I was about 15 years without ever doing a show because I was so absorbed in teaching. I really loved it.

Then I started again pretty much by accident. After a few years, I thought, how the hell did I ever leave without doing this? That’s when I decided to quit teaching and act full-time. It’s funny how you can close yourself off to something like that and then open the faucet just a little bit and it’s like, you realize how much you needed it.

Yeah. The way it happened was strange. I hadn’t done any acting for quite a while and a cousin of mine introduced me to the Arts and Culture Club in Toronto.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. It’s an absolutely wonderful place. One of the things you do there every year is a sketch comedy show, which is written and performed entirely by members.

I got into that in my first year. After three or four years, I was in the club and somebody came up to me and said, aren’t you supposed to be at that rehearsal or at that audition? I said, what audition? Apparently, somebody, an American television director, had come to Toronto and he was going to do the world’s premiere of a rap musical version of A Clockwork Orange. Okay.

Okay. Maybe okay with you. He was going to do it at the Hart House Theatre, where I had done a couple of shows as an undergraduate, but they closed the Hart House Theatre for 25 years.

Who knows why? This audition was happening in the room three feet behind my shoulder as we spoke. I went in and said, what’s all this about? I wound up being cast as the chaplain in this show. That would have been the end of that, except that somebody introduced me to Jeremy Hutton, who has done a lot of stuff there.

I found it fascinating right from the first. I knew that he was going to be the director of the next show, which would be Othello. I said, I don’t have time to do any more of this.

I’m not going to. At the absolute last minute, I decided to go and audition for him. If I’d been 30 seconds later, it would have been too late.

It was the last evening of his auditions. They were just packing up. I said, I didn’t want to read for you.

He opened up again and gave me this wonderful speech in Othello, Iago’s speech, put money in thy purse, love. He gave it to me and I read it absolutely cold. I’m quite a good cold reader.

I finished and he said, you know, you made exactly the same mistake I always make when I read that passage. It was one single syllable word, which I read as something else. Anyway, he wound up casting me as Brabantio, which is a very small role.

I got into the rehearsal with this and I thought, what the hell am I doing here? I’m way out of my depth. These guys know so much more than I do. I managed to get through it because Jeremy is a very demanding director, but he’s a very patient director.

I got through it thinking, you know, he actually got me to do some stuff I would never have believed I could do. I auditioned for him again the next year. After three or four years, I started thinking, I have to keep doing this.

Jeremy and the Hart House Theatre particularly are what made me want to keep doing it. Then I met some people there who got me connected in one way or another with other theatre companies. The Single Thread, which is a wonderful outfit, that started as a student group at Queen’s.

The Soup Can and Brandon Crone’s Safeword and so on. The relationships are all terribly incestuous. They’re all lending talent to each other.

You get involved with one and you get involved with others. I started learning how much talent there is in the independent theatre, how many different places there are, how many different groups there are to work with. By this point, I was completely hooked.

There’s so much interesting work happening in the indie world as well. So much. I sometimes wish I could persuade… I mean, the big established companies are doing great stuff and so on.

But I do wish some people would, instead of spending 140 bucks to go and see The Sound of Music again, would go and see six or seven indie shows instead and find out all the… There’s a lot of stuff happening in the independent theatre that is not at all comfortable. Oh yeah, absolutely. There’s a reason for that.

But it’s also really exciting. Yeah, very exciting. There’s so much interesting work and it’s work that, in some cases, some of the established theatres wouldn’t do because they have concerns about their subscriber base or they don’t want to offend this group or that group.

And the indie groups can really push the envelope. And if they don’t make a profit on a show, I mean, they don’t expect to, and most of them have bricks and mortar they have to look after. Practically everybody I know in the indie theatre is actually making a living doing something else, which I wish didn’t have to be true.

So there’s a sense that they can afford to take risks because they’re going to be broke anyway. Sure, well, that’s the thing. If your goal has been, well, if we can come close to breaking even, then we can call this a success.

You’re not worried about… You’re not reporting to a board of directors or things like that about your losses and worrying about a profit. And every once in a while, I think we snag a few more interested people. So, and I find that the cross-pollination is really exciting.

I don’t know if you know of a monthly event called Sing for Your Supper. I’m aware of that. I’ve been a few times, I’ve been a few times, yeah.

Absolutely wonderful. I haven’t been there for more than a year because I’ve been so busy every single damn month, but I love it. And one of the reasons it’s such a wonderful event is that you get people from all over the place, not just actors, directors, writers, and so on, coming together and just saying, okay, what do you got? What that I can be interested in now? And there’s always somebody there you’ve never met before who keeps coming back.

The first one of those, the first or second of those I went to, which would have been more than 10 years ago now, they were meeting probably illegally in an abandoned building downtown on Temperance Street, replaced by a condominium tower. And I read something and a young guy came up to me afterwards and said, hi, I’m a filmmaker. Can I put your name on my list of actors to get in touch with when I need actors? And I said, sure.

A young Toronto director named Christian Distallo. And a couple of years later, I made a little film with him, a story that he had conceived himself and sensibly got somebody else to write for him. And it wound up at the Cannes Festival in 2015.

So, the connections are extraordinary. And you meet somebody and then three years later, you think, wow, what did that lead to? It’s all over the place. Absolutely.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing. If you think about people who have come from indie, people like Kat Sandler and Cedar Brouhaha, when they started doing stuff, they’re doing stuff out of pocket, renting a theatre and doing their own stuff. And then she’s produced by Terragon and Factory in the same year, things like that.

So, there’s a path from indie to a little more mainstream. But I think people who start indie, they always, I think, keep a foot in indie. I think you’re right.

Yeah. Her, the last show, The Hardhouse season this year is a play of hers as well. They’re just auditioning for it right now.

It’s called Retreat. Okay. Nice.

Unfortunately, there is no role in it for me, I’d love to do some of her stuff. I had a chance actually to read in public a play that she had just written a number of years ago, the final day of the Fringe Festival. There was going to be a reading.

I think, I don’t know, she’d won the Fringe writing contest or something. The 24-hour play writing contest. Yeah.

But there was going to be a reading late on the Sunday evening. And somebody called me and said, would you like to be one of the readers? Yeah. I had a rehearsal at 10 o’clock the next morning in Kingston for the then new Kingston Theatre Festival, the Cake and Push Festival.

So I had to say no and I’ve regretted it ever since. Because I had to get there and meet my parents. That was probably late night, which was then produced by Moses Neimer at the Zuma Theatre a few years later.

Yeah. In terms of, you mentioned how you were born an actor, you were always doing that sort of thing. For a lot of people, we act and imagine when we’re younger, when we’re children.

And it’s something that we grow out of or it’s grown out of us. I think that they can be pushed to the sidelines. You’re too old for that.

But actors sort of hold on to that for a while. And I don’t know. I don’t know why.

I don’t know what’s different. Retrospectively, I can probably imagine some of the things that, if they didn’t cause me to be an actor, fed it. I grew up in a house full of books.

Both my parents were highly literate and very much concerned that their children should know and love the language. One of the reasons I don’t watch television is that my mother did this wonderful thing that you couldn’t possibly do now. She refused to have a television until her youngest child was an addicted reader.

And it worked. We all, I have four siblings and we all read, except sometimes we stop reading and talk. Yes.

Yeah. So I was encouraged to read anything I wanted to read. Our parents read to us when we were tiny children.

We were all fluent readers before we went to school. And I think some people are just more conscious of the importance of stories than other people are. We tell each other stories all the time.

We can’t communicate without telling stories. And I guess because of the way I grew up, I’ve just always been really, really aware of that. And I’ve always been a talker as well.

My father could make up completely ridiculous stories and tell them in such a way that you never even considered that they might not be true. You could say extraordinary things with a totally straight face and say, well, he’s so earnest about that. And then you discover that it was complete nonsense.

And in a strange, unconscious way, I’m very analytical about language and argument. I could never do math beyond arithmetic and a certain amount of geometry. But if you want me to figure something out rationally, if you give it to me in words, I can do it and have fun doing it.

It’s one of the reasons that I had so much fun teaching. Making people understand stuff is always very enjoyable to me. But where fundamentally the desire to perform comes from, I just don’t know.

But I know it’s absolutely essential to me. I do think that there’s something that happens when a child is read to from a young age. If you see and hear somebody performing a book, which is if you read well, performing a book, once you get past the stage where there’s a picture book and now you’re telling the story, there’s something about that that I think gets in deep.

And that now, in my head, I’m performing the story in my own way. I think that being read to, becoming a reader, is sort of a requisite for some aspect of it. I think so.

I don’t really understand quite how. This is making me wish I could remember a little bit more about the way it developed. Hmm.

There is an interesting, recently I heard somebody on a radio show, I heard on the podcast version, they were talking about how science still doesn’t understand what happens in our brain when we read. Because we translate words into images in a way that is not fully understood. All the things that are happening when we read, because the ways that we see ourselves as the different characters, the way that we see the words on the page is not fully understood what the mechanic of that is, which is a fascinating thing.

It is fascinating. And I know, absolutely, I find myself a character in the story all the time. At least if the book is any good.

And I do that, I read a lot of history, I do that with history as well. And I suppose, actually, if you’re reading history or biography, which I also read a lot of, you’re putting yourself into a picture that doesn’t actually exist, you’re imagining situations that aren’t, in fact, as they were, and so on. And with fiction, that doesn’t matter so much.

It’s easy to mislead yourself about something that way. But yeah, I have had lots of conversations with fictional characters. I’m sure you’re aware of the great, vast by this point, world of fan fiction.

Yes, yeah, yeah. Boy, I bet that covers a whole range. But I can remember doing that when I was a kid, wanting to know.

And I think it’s partly got to be a hunger. I can remember, I was a rather solitary child in some ways, even though there were lots of people around me. And I remember reading stories saying, I wish I knew that person.

And then I would make up adventures for us to have together. So yeah, I think early immersion in stories gets you telling stories. When you were teaching history, was there a particular aspect of history, period of history that you most enjoyed telling people or teaching? Well, my own academic background, such as it is, is in modern European history.

So that was the thing that was easiest for me. But we had a sort of movement among the students about halfway through my time there, people saying, please, please, please, could we learn some classical history? So then we started teaching some Greek and Roman stuff. And then I taught for a number of years, a sort of Western intellectual history course, which was a lot of fun.

And it was eventually taken over by one of my colleagues who actually had a much better background for it than I had. I think the thing I was most interested in, actually, was the philosophy. So we talked a lot about politics and intellectual developments.

And I did a lot of stuff on 20th century European history. So I read a lot about the backgrounds to the wars and how all that stuff developed. The military history itself was never an interest of mine.

And after a few years of teaching, I started teaching philosophy. And I found that in some ways, that was the most rewarding thing of all. And I found that because I found that it was one of the things to which kids were most responsive.

I had some kids who were very, very interested in history, very responsive to, you know, the changes in the flow of events and so on and so forth. But as a general rule, I think by the time they get to high school, kids have been taught that history is boring. And sometimes it’s, you know, it’s a real chore to get them involved in it somehow.

I can remember one year teaching the Canadian history course to grade nine students. It was just deadly. I thought, how on earth do we… Not because there isn’t a lot of interesting Canadian history, but there was just something wrong with this particular curriculum.

Let’s make this all as boring as we possibly can. I did find that the best part of teaching history for me was once I got them a bit interested, there would be some really interesting questions. And trying to make people understand, they understand to have a really neatly organized world in their heads.

And I found it very satisfying, sometimes kind of frightening, trying to make them understand that we don’t actually have a lot of really simple solutions to big complicated problems. And it’s all very nice to think, you know, well, the people demanded this and the people achieved that. Well, who are these people we’re talking about? Do you realize that there are 970 different interest groups involved in this? And you’ve also got political leaders who have their own axes to grind, possibly don’t know as much about the situation as they wanted to believe in.

And getting them to realize, because once again, I was dealing with a lot of bright kids, getting them to understand that a lot of things are way more difficult and frustrating than they imagined. In other words, trying to help you grow up a little here. I found that interesting.

But I think the thing I found most rewarding was philosophy, because there’s so much opportunity to get them to look at their own ideas and say, oh, gee, maybe I need to think a little more deeply about it. And I also spent a lot of time in that philosophy course teaching them how to reason in words, the logic of rhetoric, the reasoning of natural language. And it was absolutely astounding.

I would give a class full of bright kids a syllogism. No, everybody in this class is a high school student. You are in this class.

Therefore, you are a high school student. It’s absolutely basic, simple reasoning. And I would get these fantastic reactions.

They would say, you mean, there are actually rules to thinking and there are ways of putting pieces of information together, which will give you absolute certainty that another piece of information is true. And part of me says, well, what the hell they’ve been now. But part of it said, yeah, and now we can go on from here.

And you can know that you don’t have to be constantly frustrated by your inability to come to a reliable conclusion about something. And the bright ones would just grab this. Were there others that had difficulty accepting it? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It was a school for bright kids. Almost all our kids went on to university. Almost all of them graduated from university.

But there was still a range. I had one philosophy class which had 10 kids in it. Four or five of them were pretty typical students of the school, which is to say reasonably bright.

A couple of them don’t think we’re not bright enough to do it, but realized that they or possibly hadn’t yet realized that they weren’t really interested in doing it. So I didn’t get a lot out of them. One extremely bright kid and then two of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my entire life and all in this one little group.

So, yeah, there were some who had trouble with it. There were some in any class, I’d rather be doing something else. This is my least favourite subject, or you’re my least favourite teacher, but I have no way of telling you that.

But my great good fortune in that place, of course, was that we had parents who were on the whole interested in their kids, which makes a big, big difference when you’re trying to get something done. We had a very good music program. We had a very good visual art program.

We could not persuade the boss to let us teach drama as a curriculum. Is there a particular reason why? I don’t know. I think they’d set out, you know, working in a particular way and they were very successful.

We did drama as an extracurricular thing, but I do remember at one point going and saying, you know, there is a credit course that we could be teaching and we’ve got people who are qualified to teach it because I wasn’t the only actor there, but we just never… However, they have, I know, in the years since I left, which is eight or nine years ago now, they have been doing more and better stuff in their extracurricular drama programs. Maybe that’s all they need. But I have three or four former students who went on to into the theatre, a couple who’ve been through the National Theatre School, so they were obviously getting, you know, something out of it.

But I found the theatre stuff we did and the public speaking we did, we forced our kids to learn something about public speaking. Every year, every kid had to make a speech about something or other and we made them do class presentations and stuff like that and they all hated it. But it’s amazing what we saw about kids waking up, kids becoming socially much more easy.

And every year we had kids coming back halfway through their first year of university and saying, you know, I hated speech night, but thank you so much because I’ve got classmates disappearing left and right because they can’t get up in front of a class. And, you know, they won’t even start. They’re scared.

I had one student, very bright kid, who at a very young age became the Commander-in-Chief, whatever it’s called, of a division of one of the big, big banks. I don’t know, like 25 or something. And he came back and said, you know, this was really interesting to me.

I was one of a thousand candidates. And when they offered me the job, I said, okay, why did you choose me? And one of the things they said to me was you were the only person we interviewed that could get up in front of a group of strangers and explain what he was thinking about. And I thought, yeah, if I told a class that that’s what this can do for you, they’d all say, don’t be ridiculous.

Of course. Of course. Yeah.

But they come back later. And yeah. Well, there’s certain things you can’t tell a student.

Oh, absolutely. You know, how this can serve them down the road. Absolutely.

It’s something they have to realize on their own. I had a boy who I hadn’t realized to be particularly interested in an English class, and he came back to school some years later and said, I’m reading my way through all of Shakespeare because just something came back from your class and said, yeah, you know, there’s got to be something here. I had a very strange and disappointing passage with a senior teacher a wonderful person who was fantastic with small children.

And at one point I said in the course of a general conversation that I thought we should be teaching younger kids the basics of logic, the basics of rhetorical reasoning. And she said, no, no, at that age, they’re too young. And I thought, well, A, I don’t think that’s true.

And B, a lot of what I’m doing as a teacher is laying timed charges. I don’t expect them to understand all this now, but I do expect them to be coming back in their own minds a few years later and say, oh, that’s what they were talking about. And I think, I mean, that certainly happened to me throughout my life.

Now I know why they were on about that at school. And of course, we also had the idea that pushing them a little beyond what they already know is better than just giving them the same damn thing they’ve been doing all along. Which is, not to go back to the theatre or anything, is one of the reasons that I love doing this because there’s always something new.

There’s always something that you’ve never done before or had to do before. And that’s sort of what keeps me at it. I can’t think… I mean, one of the frustrations of working in the independent theatre is you never get to run a show for very long.

That’s very true. The idea of being cast as the detective in The Mouse Trap and playing the same role for 17 years, no, I couldn’t possibly do that. I do think, though, that there’s something almost sad about the two-week, three-week run.

You can almost just be hitting into a momentum and then you have to close. Absolutely. And I remember the first show, I think probably the only show I’ve ever done, I can’t now remember what it was, where we actually had three or four preview performances.

I’d never understood why those were so valuable. I just closed a show on Saturday and we had had eight performances. That was it.

And we were definitely… The last performance was the best one. Sure, yeah. I mean, if you run for even a month, you’ve passed through the learning and now you really know the show and now there’s a certain amount of comfort and play that can happen.

Absolutely. And it’s wonderful when you get to that stage because everything becomes so much freer. I love working with actors who are prepared, not actors who want to prank each other, but actors who are prepared to take risks and accept risks in the middle of the performance.

Oh, sure. Do a little something a little differently because one of the great things about that is that it gives you something that is genuinely something you have not experienced before, so you make a very genuine response to it. I remember the first time I did a show in the Campbell House, my grandson was played by Brandon Crone, who’s just insanely talented.

And he and I started… We had one wonderful scene together and he and I started doing little different things. Sometimes it was just a matter of, you know, I would pour a drink and hand it to him and then pour one for myself and one night I’d do it the other way around and he would, you know, he’d be resentful. Yeah.

I wasn’t following the ritual. But it would be the character who was saying, wait a minute, that’s not how it’s supposed to go. It wasn’t Brandon being thrown off.

Yeah. And we do little things to each other just so that there was always something to react genuinely to. Sure.

I mean, I’ve worked with some actors in the past where the way they do it is the way they do it and it’s almost like as soon as you get on stage they press play on that tape recorder. Yeah. And it sort of becomes, you sort of, it’s kind of boring.

Yeah. There’s nothing new to react. There’s nothing really to react to.

Yeah. Instead of just letting it come out the way that it comes out, which allows for a little, even if you’re not like changing much, there’s nuances in the way that you react to people. Absolutely.

And you know, I’m sorry. I know that the basic job is to do the same thing every night, but you can’t possibly do it exactly the same way every night because there’s so many things that aren’t, you’ve got a different audience. The audience has a huge effect.

Yeah. So if you’re not prepared to respond to little things that are different, I mean, you know, somebody changes the blocking by accident and you continue to do what you were doing before and it doesn’t make any sense. So, you know, I love those little things that, yeah.

I mean, it’s the difference if you, you know, live theatre, it’s the magic of live theatre. It will never be that way again. Yeah.

It will never be exactly that way. Yeah. And if in film you do it once, you put it together, it’s always going to be that way.

But the magical thing about theatre is that it is live and people are fallible and things happen, things change. And well, that’s fun too, is when something does go wrong, how quickly experienced actors can fix it. Oh yeah.

Yeah. It’s always fun to watch something go wrong on stage and to see in some, you know, in some shows that might be the most riveting moment is when people are reacting to that. Well, the other thing, of course, is I have frequently done, I mean, I do something wrong in every show and I’ll come off stage and, you know, apologize to my scene partner and they’ll say, well, I didn’t see you do anything wrong.

Yeah. Um, your own mistakes are big in your own imagination. Absolutely.

Most of the time, the audience doesn’t see anything. And I was explaining this in the show I just finished, there were some good actors who are actually something else, a lawyer and they were terrific at this. One of them, I think it had not, uh, had not had a lot of experience and he did something that, uh, I wasn’t on stage at the time and it was obviously a very, very minor thing.

I mean, transposed two lines or something and he was really beating himself up about it. And I said, listen, you have to be aware that 99% of the time the audience has no idea what’s going on. And very, very much at the time, the other people on stage didn’t see you do anything wrong either.

And you got to just, and I told him about, um, uh, I met, I did one sort of late rehearsal session once with Stephen Wimatt, who was a friend of the director I was working with and came in to do a sort of last minute talk with me. And he told us about this thing that they, he said they do at Stratford, which is instant forgiveness. You make a mistake on stage, you start brooding on it, you’re dead.

You just, you start a whole chain of things. You have to say, okay, that was wrong, but you did it fine. Forget it.

Keep going. And I would try to explain that to this guy. And I don’t think he was getting it.

Um, but it’s hard to do you because you’re so exposed and you know, when you’re a little boy and you steal a cookie, you think everybody in the street knows that you just stole a cookie. Well, when you actually are standing in front of a crowd of people who are watching what you’re doing, it’s easy to think, oh my God, everybody saw that my career is over. And if you do that, you’re, you just screw everything up.

You have to say, all right, I won’t do it again. Now let’s keep on with it. Yeah.

No, you absolutely, you have to, you, you can’t hold onto it or it does affect everything. Um, just as we’re, as we’re, as we’re finishing off, um, in terms of, of, of a Christmas carol, um, is there, um, something that you, I mean, it’s early days for rehearsal, but is there something that is, um, exciting you the most about it? Frightening you the most about this character? What’s, what’s really got you going? Yeah. Um, I think the, the thing I mentioned before about making the transition, making him a believable character in the first place, and, you know, he’s a pretty unappealing character at the beginning.

Um, making a believable character in the first place, making a, a transition that is not too lumpy into another, but much more pleasing believable character. I think that’s the big thing. Yeah.

Um, and there are also a couple of places where the, um, the semi-hysterical moments are a little difficult to make believable. Sure. Um, how do you react the first time you see a ghost, you know, when you feel threatened? Yes.

Yeah. Um, and Dickens of course has, Dickens’ sentimentality can be a bit of a bore sometimes. I think he actually, I don’t think he is, he is as sentimental in this story in some ways as he is in some of his other works, but there are things that appeal very much to the Victorian sensibilities as we understand them that don’t go over so well with a modern audience.

Yeah. And, and figuring out how to present those things, convey the emotional power without making them think, oh yeah, you know, you’re being melodramatic. I think that’s going to be the technical.

Yeah. Yeah. But he’s also a little bit preachy at points.

Oh, Dickens is absolutely, absolutely preachy. He’s definitely, he’s definitely, he definitely wears his agenda on his sleeve in, in this particular book. And I, I’m quite happy putting myself behind that agenda.

Um, I think in some ways the difficult part of this for me is going to be this Scrooge at the beginning. Um, because in some ways he’s pretty unpleasant without being provoked. Yeah.

Without really being provoked. I mean, he, he speaks the way he speaks to some of the characters who, who simply don’t happen to agree with him about something. He, he had, there’s a real speak of nastiness in it.

Yeah. Uh, and I’m quite capable of being nasty, but I’m not usually nasty to people who haven’t done any, done any injury. Yeah.

So I find that a bit unnatural. Um, but yeah, I think it’s the, even though the arc of the character is a, is a very clear and obvious one, I think it’s going to be a tricky one to follow convincingly. Um, but I’m really, I’m looking forward to it.

I mean, there’s so many talented people and there’s a number of them I have never worked with before, but some of them I have. And I think I know how much great stuff there is to work with just in the talent. Awesome.

Well, Thomas, thank you so much. Well, thank you. This has been a homebody productions production.