Interview with Simon Callow, 30th April 2004 by Peggy Nuttall

On the back of a disappointingly short West End run as publishing hot-shot Mark Melon in Simon Gray's 'The Holy Terror', multi-talented writer, director and actor Simon Callow muses over the state of British theatre today, his proudest accomplishments of his career and what he would do as self-appointed minister of the arts.

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At the time of our interview Simon Callow faced the closure of his latest venture as leading role Mark Melon in 'the Holy Terror' at the Duke of York's theatre. In it Simon Gray tells the story of Mark Melon, a ruthless and power-hungry publisher who believes he can single-handedly save a failing publishing company. Telling his story directly to the audience in a confessional narrative, Melon begins to lose his grip first professionally and then personally, his slow breakdown playing out inexorably before the audience's eyes.

The play was first staged seventeen years ago. This resurrection of it by Simon Gray was greeted by an almost universally bad press. Its reception is a sensitive issue for Callow; as the leading character Mark Melon he is the dominating force, both in terms of the play's subject and in sheer time spent on stage (he is not absent from a single scene). The other characters offer him something to bounce off now and again, but there is no doubt that this is Callow's play.

We did not get to the nub of why the play failed. Since Callow was not prepared to hazard a guess, one can only speculate as to whether this is genuine disbelief on Callow's part, or that kind of defensiveness born out of the sort of vulnerable pride that one forgets even hugely successful people are prone to now and again. So instead we discussed the play itself and what attracted him to it in the first place. The writing had something to do with it as 'very literate, very mercurial, very provocative...and very theatrically audacious', but the character of Mark Melon was the final seduction for Callow. 'He's a familiar figure in my life. Very pressured, rather brilliant, very engaging, a gracefully ruthless kind of person.'

I found Mark Melon a tricky character to watch, a greedy figure whose ambition for success took over his life at the expense of family and friends. So how did Callow approach the challenge of leading a show with a character that – on the surface at least – is unsympathetic? 'I live with that all the time, I don't find that unattractive. It becomes unattractive when his adrenaline starts to get out of control [and] he starts to destroy people and himself. That's scary to me rather than unsympathetic.'

There is no denying that Callow put hard work into the adrenaline-driven Melon. Aside from his thrice weekly visits to the Claridges gym to keep on top of the performance physically, how did Callow tackle the nightly barrage of emotion? 'You have to be on top of it...be completely on top of the text, completely aware of the sequence of emotions and ready to anticipate them. Every performance of every kind requires that you are at one hundred percent of your powers...'.

And perhaps this is the secret of Callow's success: pure hard graft. In a creative career that can only be described as eclectic Callow has conquered the challenges of acting, writing and directing with equal skill and vigour. Is he fulfilled yet? It seems not. When asked which creative medium he prefers he responds 'frankly: whichever one I'm not doing at the moment.'

But there is clearly more than that to Callow's artistic drive. It becomes clear that his persistent curiosity in everything artistic is the source of his ambition, and in turn the cause of an unrelenting desire to do more. 'I don't think I've tapped more than a tenth of my potential as an actor, but then I don't think anybody ever does. Most of us don't – that is to say, the ones who were extraordinary have done. I got diverted by other things.'

His earlier ambitions focused on writing until, as he puts it himself he discovered that 'I really had nothing to write about, nothing that struck me as anything anybody else would want to read.' Had he not wanted to complete a theatrical hat-trick and write some scripts too? 'I don't seem to be able to think like a playwright. Plays always have to live in their language one way or the other...I don't think I have the verbal gifts that a playwright needs to have.'

Instead he found a penchant for narrating stories, whether of his own or others, in a number of biographies and autobiographies, including a brave account of his very personal relationship with Peggy Ramsay in 'Love is Where it Falls' (1998), which Callow considers to be the proudest accomplishment of his career to date. 'I do think I managed to convey on the page what sort of woman Peggy was, and to that extent I made her live, allowed her to live. Because people's memories are of course really short...it had to be written down. It took me a very long time to write.' And just how long? 'By my standards very long, about 3 months, that's very long for me...I wrote my first book in three weeks.'

In view of the fact that writing is the least known of Callow's chosen professions, it seems that fame for him is a by-product of his other more central achievements. Although this humility may have developed later in life: 'I had an idea when I was about 14 or 15 that I wanted to be a TV personality. I thought it was a very good calling – to be David Frost. But that passed'. Instead he found himself training as an actor at the Drama Centre where he developed the ability to put his charisma to work on behalf of the masses. 'Even when I was at school I was the head boy...I've always been able to speak on behalf of other people quite well...[it] didn't always do me a lot of favours. I always had an inclination to speak with the voice of the tribe.'

For this reason he wrote a personal account of theatre in 'Being an Actor' in 1984 (which is soon to be reissued, together with 'Shooting the Actor', each containing120 new pages), and it also led to his high-profile campaigning on behalf of the gay community in the Eighties. 'If you have achieved a certain degree of celebrity and perhaps respect, and there is a matter which concerns you, then it's a responsibility to lend weight to it...Now I don't have much to do with it, I don't think they need me at all.'

If it is true that Callow's fame is now less needed in service of the underdog, what is his place in the land of celebrity? In answer to this he embarks on an exploration of his multiple identities, but fails to reconcile them into a single picture of how he believes he is viewed. If he does have a single identity in the public mind then Callow's biggest concern is less what it actually is, but how it may affect him. 'The problem is that people sort of know what I sound like in life all too well...people just know too much about me. It may be that my public profile is a danger to me.'

Does being well known therefore serve to detract from the point of his work? Speaking of 'this terrible word 'celebrity'' what appears to drive Callow is not the numbers of people he reaches but the way in which he reaches them. 'It may be an insane delusion that [we believe] what we're doing really matters. It isn't just a diversion or a kind of rush, a high, but it can actually get to people at a very deep level.'

Does he believe in London theatre today as a forum to reach people in that way? Perhaps he did not think this twenty years ago when he painted a rather bleak picture of what theatre had become in 'Being an Actor'. 'What I was saying really was that the kind of theatre that I believed in was rapidly disappearing. But there is another theatre there and sometimes wonderful things are done. The fundamental difference to me is that actors are really no longer at the centre of the process, and I find that acting itself has become rather unambitious...actors don't get the chance to work on themselves out of the metropolitan spotlight.' He goes on 'there's nothing quite like the business of gestating...of maturing, of the full flavour of your personality being given time to establish itself. We're all whipped out of the oven far too quickly.'

Why does he think this is so? 'Economics and society. People expect quick results from other people and quick results for themselves. It's still a very disposable society and art is just one of the many things that you snatch up and throw out again.'

And if economics and society were amenable, what could be done to meet Callow's ideal of slowing down the whole process? 'One of the most valuable things to happen would be for a drama school to be attached to the National Theatre or the RSC, and for young actors to slowly feed in to the company, and for there to be a sense of perpetual training.'

This seems to ignite a spark in Callow, so he sets off on a flight of fancy. '[I would] set up regional centres around the country so that all the great cities has a theatre and that productions passed from one to the other, and that when one such place originates a production it then becomes part of that grid.'

And for Callow himself one gets the sense that this frustration originates from a very personal sense of creative restriction in the society he describes. 'I still have a dream of belonging to a company of actors who would be as it were in perpetual training...there are certain parts and roles I have my eye on now I'm of an age to play them...but I'd like to do it in the context of an organically connected group of people who had similar views of the theatre rather than a group of actors who have just come together for the purposes of doing this one play.'

And the methods by which these ideas could be realised? His eyes light up, 'They just have to make me the minister of the arts and then everything will be transformed.'