Simon Callow
‘Four Weddings’ wouldn’t get made today
‘IFour Weddings and a Funeral wouldn’t be made today, because society has changed,” says Simon Callow. I’ve just asked the prolific actor and author what he thinks the chances are of a film being commissioned now about a coterie of white, upper-middleclass friends tying the knot.
He contrasts it with Michaela Coel’s “dazzling, brilliant” BBC drama I May Destroy You, which he says, “would absolutely not have been possible 25 years ago”.
But it’s interesting, he notes, “that people, if they’re feeling a bit blue, like to put Four Weddings on and watch it for the hundredth time. That’s the wonderful thing about the arts, that there’s this huge back catalogue which is full of illumination for us about the way people were, and the degree to which some things haven’t changed.
“There is a big move to eliminate the past, as though the past is of no use to us any more. But this is clearly an impossible proposition.”
This past, of course, was a mere quarter of a century ago. Callow, a 44-year-old stripling when filming began in the summer of 1993, famously provided the death for the funeral in the film, playing the archetypally flamboyant gay man, Gareth. Ironically, I catch up with him over the phone on a brief holiday on the Greek island of Mykonos, where his wedding to Sebastian Fox – a global engagement manager for Amazon, who’s 35 years younger than Callow – took place in 2016.
Callow was rehearsing a musical in New York when lockdowns began to spread across the world. He caught the last plane out to London, where he’s mostly been holed up since March, fitting in all sorts of work as his diary plans dissolved, from voice-overs to book reviews to a film-yourself documentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Tonight, Chris Whitty permitting, he’ll be “incarnating” Charles Dickens for a tiny audience of 25, at the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Clerkenwell, where customers will be able to enjoy the show with dinner to follow.
It’s a noble attempt to put theatrical performance back on the menu in Britain. (“I think the Government was very, very, very slow to step in,” he says.) The intimate setting though is certainly rather different from the 2-3,000-seat auditoria in which the Victorian novelist performed wildly popular readings from his best-loved works, with no amplification, leaving himself utterly drained.
Callow, a serious scholar of Dickens, will be attempting to conjure that experience as it might have been in the 1860s. One of the passages he’ll be reading was once Dickens’s showstopper – the brutal murder of Nancy by her boyfriend, Bill Sikes, from Oliver Twist. Callow will not, however, be including Dickens’s anti-semitic references to the villainous Fagin. “It’s a very difficult thing for all of us Dickensians, the way [Dickens] ventingly says, ‘the Jew, the Jew’,” Callow admits, noting that Dickens was amazed that people accused him of being anti-semitic, claiming he was referring to one man not a whole race.
Yet put alongside his support for a Jamaican governor who suppressed a rebellion of plantation workers in 1865 by killing 439 people, there is justification at least for the reasons behind the graffiti attack in June on the Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, which had “Dickens racist” daubed on it, in capital letters.
How does Callow feel about the possibility that, 150 years after his death, the writer of David Copperfield could find himself “cancelled”?
“I think the cancellation of Dickens is a virtually impossible task,” he replies. “If the thought was that Dickens’s books would be burnt and suppressed and taken out of circulation because of that, it’s an absurdity. We would lose so much that’s so vital and life-enhancing and illuminating and generous and funny.
“I don’t believe in cancellation,” he adds. “I absolutely think we should face up to who people are and what their failings were, and Dickens was riddled with failings and, equally, absolutely overflowing with positive virtues, and we have, I’m afraid, to take the rough with the smooth. Dickens having expressed a racist opinion doesn’t in any way disqualify him from existing, or having existed.”
I want to ask him about another of Dickens’s perceived failings: his behaviour towards the women in his life. It’s long been considered a flaw in his novels that his women characters are more two-dimensionally drawn than his men, and that his treatment of his wife Catherine, with whom he had 10 children, was appalling.
It is hard, too, to deny – though Dickens tried – that he left his wife to pursue his passion for a young actress, Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, who was then just 19 years old, to Dickens’s 46. She was 18 when they met in 1857.
Early on, Dickens bought a family home for Ellen, her mother and sister. Does Callow believe that it was an abuse of power that Dickens used his fame and wealth to seduce a teenager?
“It was, yes…” he begins, before stressing, “we simply don’t know what went on between them… whether there was sex at all.” There were, however, coded letters, and a suggestion that Nelly may have had a child by him. On the subject of her age, Callow says: “Ellen Ternan is just Mary Hogarth again.”
Hogarth was Dickens’s sister-in-law and Dickens had also seemingly once been in love with her. She was 14 when they met, and just 17 when she died, very suddenly, while living with the 25-year-old Dickens and his new bride in London. Dickens was inconsolable, expressed a wish to be buried in the same plot and wore the ring she was wearing when she died for the rest of his life.
Callow believes this represents the author’s attitude to sex. “He had a rather immature attitude, in fact. If you compare him with Shakespeare, the great difference is sex; I mean Shakespeare’s plays are just absolutely roaring away with sex all the time… whereas Dickens hadn’t sorted that one out at all.”
Does he believe that Dickens was attracted to very young women and girls? “He seems to have been… but it’s very complicated,” he says. “I think it just hadn’t properly happened in his life that he’d managed to resolve the complications of his own sexuality or even own up to it.”
Callow, of course, was one of the first actors to come out in the early Eighties. There’s a natural candour to him that can carry him towards the controversial. I’d read an earlier interview, where he’d wondered aloud, “Is blacking up so offensive? I don’t know.” Does he still think that way? “I perfectly understand why, in a world in which black people feel distinctly undervalued in society, the idea of a white person impersonating them is upsetting,” he says. He makes the point that up until Laurence Olivier played Othello on stage in 1964, “most white people who played
‘Shakespeare’s plays are just roaring with sex, whereas Dickens hadn’t worked that one out at all’
‘Anybody who puts their head above the parapet on any subject whatever will be absolutely reviled’
Othello were very intent on the idea of Othello as a Moor, and therefore with a paler skin”.
In Shakespeare’s time, the term “Moor” would have likely denoted the Berbers of North Africa – “but Olivier said, ‘he is referred to throughout the play as black…’ so Olivier studied very closely the ways in which black people move and use their bodies, which are in many cases very different to the ways that white people have, certainly in Olivier’s time when the Windrush generation had really just become part of English life.”
The Guardian considered Olivier’s performance a triumph. “This Othello compels you to accept him, not merely as a coloured man, but as a Negro, with a Negroid speech.”
Callow insists Olivier’s intention was never to caricature but “to respect black people by actually showing what they’re really like, which is what acting has been over the centuries – it has been studying other people.”
Yet he recalls his late friend Alec Guinness, who did “a full impersonation of an Indian person” as Professor Godbole in *A Passage to India* (1984), regretting it. “I remember Alec did think that it was a terrible mistake to have done that.
“It’s a very complex matter this,” he says.
Earlier, Callow has complained about “the monumental oversimplification of almost everything… We’re in a very difficult time where it’s suddenly very hard to say anything nuanced or complex about anything.”
He is, of course, talking about the fear of saying the wrong thing. “I think people are increasingly nervous of speaking out,” he says. “Obviously, people have, correctly, linked this to the development of social media and the extraordinarily unmediated expression of hatred which we are now living with, and anybody who puts their head above the parapet on any subject whatever will be absolutely reviled just for existing really. This is clearly impossible. Society cannot proceed on this basis at all.”
Simon Callow: An Audience With Dickens is at the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe, London EC1, until Saturday. Tickets: fideliorchestra.art