Mark Gatiss’ acclaimed retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is visiting Birmingham Rep for the festive season. Featuring ‘spine-tingling’ special effects, the production sees comedian Rufus Hound star as the ghost of Jacob Marley, returning on Christmas Eve to haunt his one-time business partner, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. What’s On caught up with Rufus to find out more... 

I chat to Rufus Hound online on the very first day of rehearsals for A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story at the Birmingham Rep, and immediately clock that he’s immersed himself in the show - by wearing his Muppet Christmas Carol jumper.

It is mid-October, so well before most of us have dug the sequins out of the wardrobe, but with the show opening in November, the team are already feeling festive.

He then says to me: “Don’t ask any difficult questions, as we’ve literally just started.”

Fortunately I was planning a more general discussion about the show. Adapted by Mark Gatiss, it premiered at Nottingham Playhouse, transferred to London, and now comes to Birmingham Rep for nearly two months.

So rather than quiz Rufus on the symbolism of the fourth scene, I ask him why he wanted to be in the production.

“I’ve been a lifelong fan of Mark Gatiss, both as a writer of TV and sketch and as a novelist in his own right. I’ve read a lot of Mark Gatiss, and I’m fairly familiar with his taste and how he likes things to sit.

There’s always an element of real class and theatricality, so Mark’s version of A Christmas Carol was always going to be very thrilling to me.”

Rufus is playing the ghost of Jacob Marley, who visits the miser Ebenezer Scrooge (played by Matthew Cottle) on Christmas Eve. Marley warns Scrooge, his former business partner, to change his ways or suffer in the afterlife - just as Marley himself, who is laden with heavy chains, is doing. 

“The role they were offering me in the show was the role Mark himself had played when it was first staged,” says Rufus. “So the idea of being in something written by Mark Gatiss which Mark had ostensibly written for himself was too good an opportunity to miss.”

Christmas Carols come in all shapes and sizes, and by including ‘A Ghost Story’ in its title and featuring an age recommendation of 12-plus, this production nails its colours firmly to the mast. 

So how has Rufus, who first made his name as a stand-up comedian before moving into theatre and television drama, approached the challenge of creating the spooky Marley?

“In this version of the show, Marley is the embodiment of the things Scrooge should be trying to avoid. With this version being a ghost story that’s set at Christmas, Marley is all of the things that make the ghosts horrifying. 

“In a funny kind of way, with Marley being Scrooge’s ex-best friend, it makes him more scary. If we’re walking down the street and see someone looking pretty scary, that’s bad enough, but if we walk down the street and see someone we know looking really off, that’s genuinely terrifying. I think Marley being the first ghost that Scrooge meets means he’s the one that really sets Scrooge up for the transformative horror that is about to visit him.” 

Which moves us onto the subject of just why Charles Dickens’ novella has remained so popular with audiences of films, television shows, musicals and stage drama.

“I think I’m probably not alone in that I know the story of A Christmas Carol intimately and yet I’ve never read it. I’ve never even been tempted to pick up a copy of it because some stories are just so prevalent. 

“I don’t think many kids much past the age of six wouldn’t be familiar with the idea that an old miser who is mean to everyone and hates Christmas is visited by three ghosts, one from the past, one from the present and one from the future. And upon having it demonstrated to him just how wrong he’s getting everything, he wakes up on Christmas morning with a different attitude altogether and sets about mending his evil ways. That, as an archetypal story, is one that every British person is aware of.”

So much so, says Rufus, that nobody can resist having a go at adapting the Dickens classic.

“Now does that mean that you’ve then watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, or does it mean you’ve seen any one of the thousands of shows that have taken that blueprint and then made it their own? 

“There’s a Blackadder version of A Christmas Carol; there’s a Catherine Tate version of A Christmas Carol. I don’t think there are many long-running TV shows which didn’t get to the Christmas special and think ‘We’d better do A Christmas Carol!’ Even Upstart Crow did A Christmas Carol, and that was set 200 years before the thing was even written!

“As an archetypal tale, the idea that you could, on any given night, be visited by the ghosts of your past, present and future, who then ask you to take stock of yourself, is something that we are all familiar with, and also somewhat rely on for our own moral guidance. 

“I think we all know that there’s a difference between just getting on with what we were getting on with, and then having a moral pang of some kind that makes us think that maybe we shouldn’t have done that.”

Rufus’ previous stage roles have included Sancho Panza in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Don Quixote, Dennis’ Dad in the RSC’s adaptation of David Walliams’ The Boy In The Dress, and Garry Essendine in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter at Chichester Festival Theatre.

Now he’s looking forward to performing A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story at Birmingham Rep.

“I’ve spent a good bit of time in this bit of the Midlands. I’ve spent two years living in Stratford-upon-Avon pretty much. In my stand-up career, I did loads of gigs in Birmingham, in Kings Heath and places like that. I love Birmingham to pieces; it’s one of my favourite places to be. I love the Midlands.

“Christmas can be a million things, many of them day-glo and sparkly, but it can also be a time to reflect. In that period of quiet contemplation, you may find yourself yearning for a story which has a little more meat on the bone, and a little more to say about the human condition than, for example, Sleeping

Beauty might. And to those people, I would say, you’ll find nothing finer on a stage in this country than A Christmas Carol at the Birmingham Rep.”

Feature by Diane Parkes

A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story shows at The Rep, Birmingham, from Thursday 14 November to Sunday 5 January