An inconclusive meeting with Ackroyd and Callow on the subject of Charles Dickens
“So,” I ask Peter Ackroyd, “what is this show?”
“It’s a monologue by Mr Callow in the role of Mr Dickens.”
Simon Callow snorts derisively.
“No, wrong already! God, he’s only written it and seen it 87 times.”
“Well,” Ackroyd, slumped in a sofa, tries again, “it is a one man show concerning Mr Dickens in which Simon plays Mr Dickens.”
“Mostly I play myself actually.”
The London stage has produced some strange and colourful double acts, but none quite so strange and colourful as the collaboration that has resulted in The Mystery of Charles Dickens. Callow was on the look out for a show to follow up his one-man success as Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Oscar. Having read Ackroyd’s massive biography, he decided to do Dickens, another writer whose life was as extraordinary as his work. He approached Ackroyd who obediently retreated to Madeira for ten days and wrote the show.
It toured the provinces, steadily being refined under the direction of Patrick Garland, and now it is to open in London. Callow plays himself using Ackroyd’s words, Dickens using Dickens’s words and over 40 characters from the novels, beginning and ending with Pickwick. The show runs through the life chronologically - it includes Benjamin Jowett’s funeral oration at Westminster Abbey - but draws on the books in an order determined by Ackroyd’s interpretation..
“Our views of Dickens are identical,” says Callow, “my view is simply derived from Peter’s.”
And so we meet at Two Brydges, a weird, wood-panelled, appropriately Dickensian club in the West End of which Callow is a member. He sips decaffeinated coffee and then half a bottle of champagne. Ackroyd sticks to gin and tonics. Superficially, they are as ill-matched as their drinks.
Ackroyd is slumped, languid, murmuring and seems, most of the time, to be somewhere else. His favourite answer to a question is, “I can’t answer that.” Callow sits very upright, his voice booms and his laughter is deafening. His favourite answer to a question is an anecdote. But it is noticeable that the booming actor defers heavily to the murmuring author, checking his own insights against the expert’s. And, below the clashing surfaces, they are not really all that different. They seem to have formed a mutual fan club.
“I’m the founder and only member of the Royal Ackroyd Company,” says Callow, “the RAC.”
“I’m a member of AA too,” says Ackroyd, “a founder member.”
Both were brought up solely by their mothers in relative poverty in inner London suburbs – Callow in Streatham, Ackroyd in Acton. Both are obsessed with the city - Ackroyd’s biography of London is soon to be published - and especially with its more bizarre and theatrical history, Ackroyd has also written a novel based on the life of the music hall star Dan Leno.
“London is a sort of theatre of my mind,” says Callow, “it’s a fabulous city. My grandparents lived in Brixton and my great grandfather was a music hall impressario.”
“Brixton was a big centre for music hall stars,” says Ackroyd, “Dan Leno was there too. There’s a plaque.”
And now both have been drawn first to Wilde, yet another Ackroyd book covers his death in Paris, and Dickens. What have these two in common?
“Outsiders,” says Ackroyd at once.
“Well,” says Callow, “it’s a surprising thing to say of Dickens. But he was excluded in his infancy from the charmed circle of love. Oscar wasn’t but he was excluded by being Irish and being gay. Also they are very big, large scale characters.”
“And they have an instinctive sympathy with those who suffer.”
“They come almost to the same point of compassion, but from very different places.”
In addition, both Wilde and Dickens were performers. Dickens acted out his characters as he wrote in front of a mirror and his public readings were sensational.
“He performed them absolutely flat out,” says Callow, “and in character. He was famous for his voices. He was a great mimic and he had a fantastic sense of theatre.”
“Yes,” says Ackroyd, “and it killed him. At his later readings he was very ill anyway and the strain of the performances speeded up his end – particularly the scene from Oliver Twist with Bill Sykes and Nancy. He came off the platform in a state of exhaustion. He said he spoke to his characters, they touched him or he saw them in the street. There’s a sort of madness about it, but it’s the madness of genius. It’s something to do with his infancy, with his arrested childhood. He had the sensibility of a child in some respects.”
But there is, they both admit, something missing.
“The thing we don’t get about him at all,” says Callow, “is his sexuality.”
“It’s not in my book. I didn’t get it. And I do find it intrusive. I tend not to speculate about sexual habits.”
“Well, sex is absent from his books as well. There’s no smell of it.”
Callow believes – and Ackroyd reluctantly agrees – that Dickens has political topicality.
“He had this commitment to the disadvantaged socially and emotionally. There are so few writers today who actually engage with society in that way. He’s so explicit in his denigration of injustice. He kind of by-passed democracy, he had such contempt for Parliament, he wished to address the people of England absolutely directly. It’s important to hear at our time of equivocation, of third ways. He was of no political party and he never took a single honour.”
“He refused a knighthood from the Queen,” says Ackroyd.
“He’s the exact opposite of spin, of image tailoring. This is the truth, he says, this is what has to be said. But we live in a world in which everything has to be wrapped up in some presentable form. He rubbed the noses of the people in the suppurating underbelly of their society. There is somewhere an accouint of what sounds like a modern cardboard city. That sort of journalism is so formidable. It really sounds as though he is writing it now.”
I observe that I had not previously noticed Ackroyd’s political and social conscience. He flares slightly.
“A biographer doesn’t have to be like his subjects – if he did there’d be no biographies.”
He sees Dickens more as an embodiment of his time than a social activist. He spoke for his entire age. His genius for creating an apparently endless cast of characters make it seem as though he was documenting the entire nation. It was fiction, yet it was so vivid that life began to imitate art and Britain became Dickensian.
“People learned from his books how to define themselves as British,” says Callow, “you can feel in our audiences that people feel quite proud to be British watching this show. There’s a sense that Dickens is a part of all of us. It’s a great sense of recognition.”
And yet his enormous compassion did not extend to the people around him.
“He was very imperious, authoritarian and obsessive,” says Ackroyd, “he was so full of pity and compassion, yet, as a man, he was curiously lacking in sympathy for other human beings.”
The show is true to Dickens’ own style of reading. There are no props and no costumes, Callow simply wears a modern suit.
“What about the waistcoat?” says Ackroyd, “that’s quite dazzling.”
“Yes, people gasp, it often gets a round of applause.”
Everything, therefore, depends on Callow’s ability to convey Dickens the man and his huge cast of characters with his body and his voice. It is a very strange form of theatre.
“I think it’s a fascinating form,” says Callow, “it has all the basic elements of theatre – storytelling, the relationship to the audience, the creation of character. It’s not about meticulously assembling the right details, it’s a mental event.”
“Simon’s got this fantastic gift for impersonation. It’s like my ability to imitate eighteenth century language, it’s exactly the same kind of thing.”
The experience has meant that Ackroyd – previously a poet, novelist and biographer – has caught the theatrical bug. He has been to many of the touring shows, though he hates sitting in the audience.
“It’s rather forbidding, like sitting next to somebody reading one of your books on the tube. I stand in the wings waiting for people to cry, Aurthor! Author! It’s never happened. But I enjoy watching Simon. It taught me something about Dickens’s theatricality which I had understood but hadn’t seen in front of me. I do feel I’m watching Dickens or Micawber or Mrs Gamp, I forget it’s Simon.”
He has written a so-far unpublished play about a forger – “I’ve always been interested in that twilight world – is it real or is it fake?” Meanwhile, the Royal Ackroyd Company is considering further collaborations. Callow has already recorded tape versions of Ackroyd’s novel The Plato Papers and his London biography. One future theatrical possibility would be Blake, the subject of a previous Ackroyd biography, and another would be Shakespeare, whose life he plans to write in the near future. Dickens, Wilde and Blake, however, are well known and relatively easily evoked, but only the bare facts of the life of Shakespeare are known. His voice, manner and personality are utterly lost to us.
“There’s a lot of documentary evidence,” says Ackroyd, “but nothing which pertains to the identity of the man. I think it’s to do with secret Catholicism. I think he was trained in concealment from an early age. And there’s this profligacy of language, it seems to be an inner force which is propelled through him.”
“It could be a startlingly original piece of theatre,” says Callow.
“There’s be a sense of strangeness about seeing Shakespeare on the stage. You’d have to convey an emptiness, a lack of identity.”
“Well, we could just do the interval.”
There is something uncanny about these two in full flow. The banter follows specific conventions. Serious points are made, agreed upon and then ritually subverted. It’s as if they are both continually switching characters and adopting new fictions. They are both theatrical to the core and too overwhelmed by the multiplicity of voices in their heads to take any one perspective too seriously. And they are both peculiarly English types – Callow the grand Edwardian man of the theatre and Ackroyd the fantastical wit, the creator of eccentric fictions and documentor of extraordinary lives, including, it seems, that of Callow.
“I had Simon’s voice in my head as I was writing.”
“He’s created me as a character. It’s not exactly the way I’m talking to you now, but it’s the outline of my voice. It’s me playing the role of Simon Callow. He could write my biographer and I could perform it on stage. The Mystery of Simon Callow! The Importance of Being Simon!”
“A Simon of No Importance.”
They fall about laughing.