BWW Interviews: Simon Callow Talks Dicken's Genius, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, and Good Old-Fashioned Acting

By: Katricia Lang Dec. 17, 2014

As narrator Jay Hunter Morris performs each role
in the opera

A Christmas Carol, the novella

The story of A Christmas Carol, as my interviewee Simon Callow notes, is nothing short of genius. Its wondrousness lies in its elasticity; the story lends itself to the extreme detail and verisimilitude of hyperrealism as well as the incredibility and brilliance only a master illusionist can achieve. It's eerie, horrific, majestic and exhilarating yet, almost inexplicably, a charming holiday classic suitable for the entire family.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL, the opera

Houston Grand Opera's newly commissioned production of the story, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, is helmed by composer Ian Bell who Callow says has created "... a real opera ... with a fantastic orchestral score and a most interesting orchestra." Additionally, there is classical vocalist Jay Hunter Morris whose responsibility as the single narrator (and performer) requires he take the shape of each character. He must have a rubber face. He must have a rubber voice. In short, he must have an instrument that stretches and bends to the will of each role.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL, the director and librettist

Finally, we reach our interviewee, the beloved British actor and Dickens authority Simon Callow. His particular genius is in his fluidity, a quality he admires in Dickens. He has mastered the stage but also appeared in Dr. Who (fittingly as Charles Dickens). In his lengthy acting career, he has acted in television, theatre, and film. In his lengthy artistic career, he has been an actor, non-fiction writer, director and, at the moment, he is the librettist and director for Houston Grand Opera's A CHRISTMAS CAROL. He's the best person to discuss this fresh, modern take on the beloved Christmas story.

BWW: Was it daunting, adapting this hugely popular story to the operatic stage?

Simon Callow: Certainly not for the opera because I had already done a one-man version of this on stage myself (as an actor) in London. That was the starting point, really, for the libretto here. In fact, it changed quite a lot, but basically I decided in 2011 to do a version of it. We'd started with Charles Dickens' own reading version of the book. He reduced it to about 90 minutes. Initially, I thought we'd just be able to use that, but in the end it turned out we needed to change it. So we did. And in so doing, discovered what I think is the essence of the piece and the nature of Dickens' particular genius, which is, in this book particularly, extreme fluidity of imagination and extreme fluidity of action. That's how we staged it in London. I was the narrator and, of course, played all the characters. And we moved from one scene to another within the twinkling of an eye. That was the sort of piece we wanted to turn into an opera.

I was approached by Ian Bell, the composer, who had heard about my performance and came to see it. He said, "This is what I want to turn into an opera." So, basically, no is the answer to your question. [I Laugh] I wasn't daunted because I knew what I was doing. And I knew Dickens very, very well. I'd written about him. I'd written about A Christmas Carol. I was just about to write a biography of Dickens, which I finished that year [2012]. I feel very much on home territory with this.

BWW: You mentioned in your previous response the genius of Charles Dickens, and you're clearly drawn to him in your professional life. What about Dickens inspires you?

Simon Callow: It's a combination of factors. Of course his literary genius, which is sort of unique. It's an extraordinary combination of a vivid understanding of people's lives and an instinctively grotesque imagination. He comes in my view out of the carnival tradition. His use of metaphors, for example, is almost hallucinatory. It's an extraordinary trip to read Dickens in my view. I think this aspect of Dickens has not really been done justice by the many, many, many, many adaptations both for stage and for screen of Dickens' work because they, in the end, are stuck in some sort of realism. Dickens is not a realistic writer at all. He certainly knew real life, but his imagination insisted on a transformative kind of writing. He's a pioneer magic realist I would say.

BWW: How do you speak to that in your directorial choices for A CHRISTMAS CAROL?

Simon Callow: We had to evolve, just as we did in London. It's a completely different design and a completely different concept of staging. But what we have to be is fluid more than anything else. I've said in the past that Dickens' genius would probably best be served in cinema in cartoon form. So what we want to achieve on stage is the ability to constantly change the scene, to change perspective, to sort of stand things on their head. It has a sort of magical element to it. But above all to be able to go from one place to another in the twinkling of an eye. My wonderful designer Laura Hopkins has achieved that with a most wonderfully delectable and fantastical stagecraft. And naturally, since there is just one man up there [performing] it, we had to make it physically possible to do all that. In the combination of those two aspects, I think, Laura has achieved something quite wonderful that serves the musical text too.

It's very phantasmagorical. That's the word in a way that describes A CHRISTMAS CAROL - phantasmagoria. It is very much a ghost story like it says on the title page. It liberates it from the normal [Laughs] capacities of human beings. People can fly through the air or they can pass through walls.

BWW: How is this monodrama on the performer?

Simon Callow: Oh, it's very hard on the performer. My god, it's hard. It was hard enough for me as an actor, but for Jay Hunter Morris as a singer who'll have to go in and out of characters - 26 characters he plays - to narrate the story, to touch on the tenderness and the horror that is in the story, just to touch on it and remove himself from it immediately, that's incredibly demanding. And the score is not an easy one. It's not like a musical. It's a real opera written by a very sophisticated composer with a fantastic orchestral score and a most interesting orchestra. There's only 15 players, with a handful of strings, some remarkable wind instruments, a little bit of brass and an astonishing array of percussion. So it's almost like a concerto for singer and orchestra. Added to it, he has to convince us all the time that he is the people that he is impersonating.

BWW: How have you helped him work through this?

Simon Callow: [Laughs] Bossing. Domineering. Bullying. Shouting and raging at him, day in and day out. [Laughs] He's the most responsive singer I've ever worked with. He's fantastic. He's a Zigfried. He's a Tristan. He's a Captain Ahab. He's done amazing work.

He hasn't done anything like this before, and he wants to be guided through it almost line by line, and I'm very happy to do that. I sort of know it very well from the inside having done it as an actor, but then we have the added element of the music, which is a plus actually. It gives him all sorts of wonderful possibilities.

But it has been tough, because what you have to do with this kind of work, above all, is to think. Your brain has to be absolutely wired up and ready to go from the instant you step on the stage. You've got to be ahead of it all the time. Many singers, probably most singers in opera, rely very much on the sensuality of the singing and of the orchestral support that they get. They look to the orchestra for that kind of big emotional and sensuous experience. In this, although there are wonderful sensuous and emotional moments, he's basically telling a story. You have to keep terrifically in focus as a performer telling a story. You have to be all the time in touch with your audience making sure they see what you're telling them about. It's a different thing if you're singing in, shall we say, [Giacomo] Puccini and your main job is to express an emotion. Here you have to give people pictures all the time so they can see these amazing landscapes.

BWW: How did you prepare for directing an opera (as opposed to theatre)?

Simon Callow: I've directed many operas. Naturally, you acquaint yourself with the score, the libretto and the demands of the piece. You work with your colleagues. You form a notion of how you want to do it and what sort of language you want to use to tell the story.

In this case, that was very, very difficult because there's no recording of course. It's a world premiere. First of all, I had a composer, who on his own admission is no kind of a singer at all, grunting and thumping his way through the part. It sounded like a terrible lament. There was 90 minutes of lamentation and playing single notes on the piano because he's also not a piano player [Laughs]. You know we worked on it together, but he really didn't give me very much. So I had that for a while. Then Kevin Ray [The Narrator on December 17 and 20] very gamely made a recording of it with a pianist, which was better. But Kevin hasn't really had much guidance about it, and it tended to sound like 90 minutes of the same thing. It wasn't until I actually started working with Jay [Hunter Morris] and the pianist here that I begin to hear the kind of score that it was. Only recently (in the last week)* we've heard the orchestra. That transforms everything. Now the full richness that Ian Bell and I had talked about all the time we were working on it, what kind of color, atmosphere, and texture he's aimed for, at last I could hear it too. I've constantly asked him about the conducting [of conductor Warren Jones]. What is the color here? What is going on in the orchestra? But it isn't until you hear it that you really get it. It was just wonderful yesterday, for the first time, to hear the full piece with the orchestra. It was just thrilling. Really, really beautiful, wonderful, eerie, spooky sounds. Then sometimes very lyrical. It's a gorgeous score.

BWW: My final question. I can't finish an interview without asking a great actor about acting. In a recent interview, you said, "The actors who are becoming famous now, Cumberbatch and his generation, are concerned solely with the conscious. They just want to act from some position of great mastery and skill and deftness whereas I think one should dig into something deeper, so that when you see an actor on stage, all sorts of memories, dreams and mystical understandings start to stir inside you. I think you can, and should be extremely shaken by an actor." Could you explicate?

Simon Callow: I wasn't singling Benedict [Cumberbatch] out. I think he's a fantastically skilled and good actor. What I think I was saying was actors today are tremendously skillful, tremendously clever, inventive and versatile, and I admire all that very much. But actors of the past - I'll just choose at random - shall we say Marlon Brando or British actors, my great heroes, like Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and so on seemed to be in touch with some sort of deeper forces. They used to have some sort of shaman-like quality. They dug into the unconscious. I think most actors today don't seem to want to go into the deepest levels of poetry that acting is capable of. One of my absolute heroes as an actor - Brando is one - is the English actor Charles Laughton. When Laughton acts, I think something stirs deeply inside you. It's beyond thinking "Oh, I recognize that guy" or "I've been in that situation" or "Gosh, isn't he clever and funny?" There's something haunting about their acting. And I like to be haunted by my artists. I don't get haunted by many acting artists these days. Nor do I really get haunted by many singers on the operatic stage. I was incredibly lucky to see people like Maria Callas and Boris Christoff.

It's really the age that we live in. We live in an age of transparency. One wants to know everything about everybody. They want to see how everything works. They don't like to believe that people have a sort of weird gift about them that defies analysis. They like to be able to explain everything. In a way, I find it a little disappointing. I want to find myself in the presence of something very profound and almost impossible to understand, so that I go away from the theatre or movie just filled with that kind of aura and atmosphere that the actor has produced.

Well, you know, that probably just makes me very old-fashioned, but that's what I'd like to see.

It is possible that the desire to feel haunted by art is old-fashioned. But doubtful. If you seek to be haunted by art, consider Houston Grand Opera's A CHRISTMAS CAROL. The production closes December 21. For more information, visit http://www.houstongrandopera.org.