Having cut his teeth at The Comedy Store before going on to star in sitcom classic The Young Ones, Ade Edmondson remains best known as a comedian, one of the key players on the ’80s alternative comedy scene. But despite this, he says, at heart he’s always been an actor, harbouring since childhood the hope of one day joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

In recent years, he’s had the chance to show off proper chops, receiving praise for his performances in ‘serious’ TV dramas One Of Us and War & Peace, as well as Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart at Soho Theatre in 2016. Now, at last, he’s living up to what perhaps once seemed a pipe dream, playing Malvolio in Christopher Luscombe’s new production of Twelfth Night, which runs at the RST throughout the winter. 

“It was back when I did Hamlet at school that I first thought, ‘Oh, I’m doing Shakespeare now, I’m going to be an RSC actor,” he explains. “It wasn’t that I decided against it - it decided against me. I auditioned for drama schools and didn’t get into any, so I went to university instead. And then, as I was trying to get an acting career, I accidentally became a comedian.”

That said, for a short time at least, there was reason to believe he might have had a lucky escape. Whether or not any of his fellow students actually made it there before him, he recalls discovering at college how “pretentious” some of his contemporaries with similar ambitions seemed to be. 
“They were all so bloody avant-garde! But in that sort of mimsy way. Not proper avant-garde, just pretending to be. Doing nude versions of Edward II and stuff like that. I mean, does anyone really need a nude version of Edward II?!”

Happily for Edmondson, his experience of joining the RSC for the first time at the age of 60 hasn’t reflected that early experience at all. The rest of the cast have all been warm and welcoming, with many of them also making their RSC debuts, including Kara Tointon as Olivia. There’s also decidedly nothing pseudo-avant-garde about this show, although there will be lots of music, and director Chris Luscombe has chosen to update the action by some 290-odd years. 

“It’s sort of a play about strange sexual exploration: you’ve got men dressed as women and women dressed as men, one man openly declaring love for another man, and a woman looking rather sad when she realises that the man she’s been in love with is actually a woman, and she sort of liked it. So we’ve set it around 1890, which is an era when the idea of unexplored sexuality was quite a big thing. It’s the time of Oscar Wilde, and we’ve also taken inspiration from Victoria And Abdul for Feste the Fool - now he’s part of Olivia’s inner circle, which I think makes him more interesting.”

Regular RSC visitors might remember Luscombe’s 2014 festive double-bill of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won (Much Ado About Nothing), which went on to tour the UK to major critical acclaim. Both featured lavish Edwardian design inspired by Warwick’s Charlecote Park, complete with seasonal décor including a massive Christmas tree. Also running over Christmas, Twelfth Night looks set to continue the trend for sumptuous settings, reuniting Luscombe with designer Simon Higlett. This time round, Higlett takes his cues for Orsino’s home from Lord Leighton’s House in Kensington, and for Olivia’s from Wightwick Manor near Wolverhampton. Meanwhile for the cast, the careful attention to detail has offered unique opportunities for learning. 

“In some ways it’s been more like going to a repository of knowledge than joining a normal cast - you suddenly get access to a lot of things that you didn’t have before. So we’ve had day trips to country houses, and lectures on letter-writing and manners and the way that people held themselves and didn’t touch each other in the 19th century.”

Feste the Fool isn’t the only character to have acquired a bit of a backstory. While his take might not be as radical a reimagining as the National Theatre’s casting of Tamsin Greig as ‘Malvolia’ earlier this year, Edmondson has been working on filling in some unexplained gaps in Malvolio’s past. 

“I’ve injected more emotion into him by inventing a time when Olivia was a child and he used to entertain her. Something has happened to him since to turn him into a bit of a grouch, but really he’s always been desperately in love with her, and feels utterly betrayed when he finds out that he’s been tricked into thinking she loves him. It’s pretty cruel, the joke that’s played on him, just for being a kind of ‘little Hitler’ in the household. We never see him exhibit behaviour that deserves the kind of punishment he receives.”

Although Edmondson is on Malvolio’s side now, he does admit he might not have been as sympathetic to the character in his youth. It’s certainly not an easy role to play, not least because he is, for the most part, quite unloveable, but also because he has to be funny without having a sense of humour of his own. Play it too much for laughs, and you risk missing the mark with his lack of self-awareness. As Ben Lawrence put it, he’s perhaps “the greatest tragic character to have stumbled upon Shakespeare’s comic universe”. 

We know Ade Edmondson as a comic, but with the recent losses he’s suffered - not least of his best friend and former comedy partner Rik Mayall - he’s perhaps a little more inclined towards tragedy these days. Just this year, he published a children’s book about a girl dealing with grief, which he described as being partly a way of processing his own. And while it might not be quite the same, acting, he says, can also offer a kind of ‘personal catharsis’. 

“I enjoy the emotional bits,” he smiles. 

Twelfth Night shows at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Thursday 2 November to Saturday 24 February.

Interview by Heather Kincaid