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Impact Chats with Award Winning Actor Adrian Scarborough
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Adrian Scarborough will be starring in his own adaptation of Alan Bennett’s The Clothes They Stood Up In at Nottingham Playhouse from the 9th of September to the 1st of October 2022. Sporting his signature flat cap, the award winning actor sat down with Hannah Penny to chat about what it’s like to be the only person to adapt Bennett’s fiction for the stage and his curious advice for making it in the acting world.
Over a brew, Adrian described how special this story is to him. He recalled his family listening to Bennett’s novella “on a cassette tape, would you believe, those were things that were around in the Palaeolithic era,” he chuckled. The story, written by the cherished creator of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van, follows a couple who come home from the opera to find all their belongings are gone. “And I mean all of them, the oven is gone, the bookcase is gone, the light fittings have gone…everything has gone, and they don’t know why,” Adrian explains.
When I asked what drew him to add playwrighting to his repertoire, Adrian said that the story is simply too funny not to. Bennett manages to pack so much into so little, “you could read it in the bath in one evening.” Adrian smiles as he describes how his family constantly quotes it. “It seems to hit a nerve,” he says, Bennett puts “little wordy ear-worms in your head” that are “unforgettable and very funny”.
This isn’t Scarborough’s first-time performing Bennett’s work or acting at the Nottingham Playhouse. When I asked him whether he wanted to keep Bennett’s voice alive or let the adaptation take on a new essence, he was adamant that his primary objective was to “keep Alan’s voice as much as is humanly possible”. Adrian has modernised it, but his writing has Bennett’s seal of approval. Adrian beams that at one point Alan “couldn’t remember what he’d written and what I’d written, which is about as delightful as it gets”. It’s nothing short of an honour, Adrian claims, to “use a bit of Bennett and turn it into something else”.
Nottingham has been a cultural sanctum in Adrian’s life, growing up not far from the city in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. He’s thrilled to be back again, after performing Bennett’s The Madness of George III there earlier in 2018, to high acclaim. “The Nottingham Playhouse is where I had a lot of my formative theatrical experiences,” he mused.
It’s not just the theatre that Adrian adores, he “was always, always very fond of the Lace Market” and the surrounding countryside. He adds that the castle is “beautiful, stunning, very jolly”. He lauded Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem and the deli that sells Mrs King’s pork pies, chuckling, “which are without a shadow of a doubt the best in the county”. He’s even filmed in Nottingham Prison, he began to laugh, “they lock you in and it’s really fucking scary!”. Adrian loves regional theatre and is thrilled to bring the world premiere of The Clothes They Stood Up In to the Playhouse. Adrian has played iconic comedy characters like Pete in Gavin and Stacey and Dreamboat Charlie in Miranda. He has gone dark in Killing Eve, and more recently, he has appeared as The Chelsea Detective. I asked him if he is drawn to a particular genre, or whether he looks for a character’s spirit that transcends this. He replied that he has “been absolutely and utterly blessed throughout [his] career at being able to play pretty much anything,” he laughs and then admits, “with the possible exception of major romantic leads”. What Adrian really likes is mixing it up.
He relays to me the piece of advice that he was given early on, to be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none; “that way,” he says, “you’re likely to be able to put marmite on the table”. He confesses that he loves playing villains but also heroes: “I love chases, I love sword fights, I love all that kind of thing.” We chuckle as he admits that the one thing he has never done but would love to do is a Western. “I’d probably be the priest or the drunk,” I joked that he’d end up in the pub next door, “exactly”, he laughs.
I asked Adrian how he has managed to play iconic characters and appear in works such as 1917, On Chesil Beach and King Lear without being type-cast. He says he used his forties to work outside of the remit of the comedy that he was known for. He found comedy cameos ended up being like “SAS acting”, where he was parachuted in, shot quickly, and had no chance to get to know the rest of the cast and crew. “It’s quite a lonely existence, that, as an actor. I tend to avoid those now because they don’t give me a lot of satisfaction.”
When I asked him if he had a preference between working on stage, television, film, or radio he replied that he likes it all. He does, however, have a soft spot for audiobooks. They are “a very meditative way of just being alone with yourself and a piece of literature,” but it’s a lot of homework. The audiobook adaptation of Les Misérables posed a French-accent shaped challenge but he contemplated that it’s nice not to be seen. Because what Adrian really loves is the spell-binding capacity of storytelling.
We began to chat about The Nottingham New Theatre, and he was overjoyed to hear about the only entirely student-run theatre in England. “How fantastic,” he beamed, “it’s not an easy thing to do!” I wondered if he had any advice that might help students trying to find their way in the acting world.
“I’m a great advocate for stealing,” after a moment, he added laughing, “from actors”. “If you see an actor do something that you think is really cool, nick it. Nick it and make it your own because they’ve probably nicked it from someone else because everyone steals in this profession. Turn it into your own and make it look like you came up with it and it will make you look very very good and very very clever!”.
Catch Olivier Award-winning Adrian Scarborough and Sophie Thompson in The Clothes They Stood Up In this September at Nottingham Playhouse and discover what you have left when you own nothing at all. You would be a fool to miss it.
Tickets available here: https://nottinghamplayhouse. co.uk/events/the-clothes-they-stood-up-in/
By Hannah Penny
Page Design by Chiara Crompton
