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Simon Callow at the Book FestivalDavid Chadderton reports from the Edinburgh Book FestivalDateline: 20th August, 2008Actor Simon Callow was at the Book Festival to talk about his biography, currently running to two volumes but at some point to become three, of actor, director and writer Orson Welles. However he spent most of his hour-long session talking about Dickens — he is performing some of Dickens's monologues at the Assembly Rooms for the Fringe — plus lots of anecdotes about his own life as an actor. Callow is performing in Edinburgh as Charles Dickens, reading two monologues that Dickens himself used to read for audiences in music halls. According to Callow, these were "the rock concerts of the day" as Dickens was an international star whose books were translated into just about every language that was printed and attracted huge audiences, and his performances were highly-acclaimed by leading actors of the day. The two that he is performing this month, Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, The Dwarf, were Dickens's most popular apart from A Christmas Carol, but they have been almost forgotten for around 150 years. He was warned off these two pieces by a Dickens scholar and told they couldn't be made to work, but, "in arrogance", he said he would "make them work". He was contacted by William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Assembly Rooms Fringe venue, asking for something Dickensian — Baroness Burdett-Coutts was a close friend of Dickens — and decided to use these pieces. Prior to this he had done An Audience With Charles Dickens and A Christmas Dickens over two Christmases for television. Callow first came across Dickens when he was 13 years old and had chickenpox. Unable to go out, he read Pickwick Papers and fell in love with the people and the world that Dickens had created, and from then tried to read as much of his work as possible. He does not believe Dickens is as universally perfect as Shakespeare, referring to his "extreme queasiness in the face of sex" and his "blandification of love objects", and there are still a few of his stories that he has not read or cannot read. He described the author as "Chaucer without bawdiness" or "Rabelais without the sex, if one can have Rabelais without the sex". Callow talked a bit about his early life growing up in a female household and wanting to be a barrister in a school that was full of trainee criminals through to his letter to Laurence Olivier to tell him what a good job he was doing running the National Theatre, which led to him getting a job in the box office at the Old Vic and then on to his decision to study acting at Queen's College, Belfast. He also spoke about his performances of long sequences of Shakespeare's sonnets, going back to 1979 for the National Theatre and more recently in Stratford, Ontario. His book Being An Actor was based on a talk he did at Goldsmith's College about "what it is like to be in the thick of it as a young actor", and this has been revised recently for a new edition. At the time he felt strongly that theatre had become a "directocracy", where actors are merely told what to do by directors and so lose their own initiatives. However he never intended to say "directors bad, actors good" as he believes that directors are essential, and in fact he directed his first production soon after writing the book. His first biography of Orson Welles, The Road to Xanadu, covered the first 25 years of the subject's life and the second, Hello Americans, covered the next five. The third, which he is about to start writing, will cover the remaining 32 years. David Chadderton
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