Fantastic Mr Fox is itching to star in Stoppard’s show
LAURENCE FOX said he was suffering from ‘itchy wig syndrome’. Is it painful, I asked.
‘Itchy wig syndrome is when you’ve got a wig on — a strawberry blond one, by the way — for three-quarters of the day and it, well, starts to itch,’ the actor said, adding he was wearing the aforementioned hairpiece for a scene in the television series Frankenstein Chronicles.
He’s starring in six episodes, as a man who went to live in Castle Frankenstein. Fox was calling me from a field ‘in the middle of Ireland’. I wanted to know about him playing Tom Stoppard’s great character, the cricket-loving playwright Henry, in a revival of Stoppard’s award-winning The Real Thing — which Stephen Unwin is directing for a tour that starts at the Cambridge Arts Theatre on September 6, before moving to the Theatre Royal, Bath on September 18.
It then scoots to the Rose in Kingston from
October 2. Stoppard’s Henry is a stranger to love.
‘He thinks words are going to get him away from the emotions of life; but he keeps being hijacked out of it, by his emotional life.’ Fox observed that there is a ‘huge amount of pain’ underpinning Stoppard’s text. ‘A lot of it is absolutely true, about life in general.’
The Real Thing, which originally starred Jeremy Irons, features a (now famous) monologue comparing a writer to a batsman punishing a ball.
Fox told me the cricket bat dialogue has become a staple for drama school auditions. ‘Stoppard is such a wonderful wordsmith,’ he said. ‘Can’t wait to get cracking on this.’
Down the line, I think I heard him scratching his head.