Actor Simon Callow talks about his new play Dr Marigold and Mr Chips at the Richmond Theatre

It's funny the things you remember from primary school. I was 10, we were doing the Victorians in class and our teacher told us: “If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would be writing for Eastenders.” It seemed so unlikely, this bearded old man from a black and white photograph scripting the latest drama on Albert Square. But the image stayed with me.

So when Simon Callow says something similar in our interview today, it rings a bell. “Dickens would write the first and last instalments,” Callow is explaining, “and other people like Mrs Gaskell would write the bits in between. It was like a soap, running all year round with its own team of writers. But it was Dickens who created the characters and Dr Marigold is one of his most extraordinary.”

In case you’re wondering, Callow is talking about Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, a Dickens double bill he will be performing at Richmond Theatre this month. Such is the actor’s affinity with the author that it’s easy to conflate the two. Callow has appeared numerous times as Dickens both on stage and screen, even making a cameo as the writer in a 1995 episode of Doctor Who.

This latest show began life in the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms, where Dickens himself performed 150 years earlier. Does knowing this fact create a stronger connection? “I always feel  that as an actor I am connected to my writer,” Callow answers sonorously. “I don’t like Ben Jonson so I loathed doing The Alchemist, but I love Shakespeare. And I love Dickens, too. I always feel his extraordinary generosity of spirit, his restless but dynamic comic presence, around me.”

Or could that be Callow’s own considerable stage presence? This, the man who first broke our hearts back in 2004 as tubby, garrulous Gareth (“It’s Brigadoon, it's bloody Brigadoon!") in Four Weddings and a Funeral and is now as likely to be charming wayward teenagers on Jamie’s Dream School or judging Joe McElderry on Popstar to Operastar. For a thesp, he sure has the people’s touch.

Born in Streatham in 1949, Callow caught the bug as a teenager, working behind the box office at Sir Laurence Olivier’s Old Vic. At 19, he headed off to Queen’s University in Belfast but lasted only nine months whereupon, as his Dream School biography puts it, “he ran away to become an actor”.

Now 62, an age when most people are reaching for their freedom passes or putting their feet up, he shows no signs of slowing down. This summer alone he has completed a critically-acclaimed run in Being Shakespeare at the Trafalgar Studios and donned drag for the month to star in Tuesday at Tescos, the Edinburgh premiere of prizewinning French play, Le Mardi Monoprix. After Marigold, it’s back to the West End for a festive season of A Christmas Carol.

“I’ve never ever worked so hard,” he says with gusto. “I couldn’t be happier, of course. But these are all solo shows too and there are particular demands to a solo show in terms of learning the lines and sustaining energy. You need to have a lot of inner resources.” Healthy eating and gym visits help, he says. “So far I don’t seem to be wearing out. Maybe I will be thinking differently by the New Year!”

The one-man show, too often theatrical shorthand for self-indulgence, has become a speciality. “Yes, I suppose over the years of my doing them, the public has got a certain confidence in me,” he says. “They have a conviction that if I’m doing it, it’s something they might like to see. That’s an exciting thing and it’s what Dickens felt so strongly. He felt it when writing the novels but nothing compared to the connection when he performed in front of an audience.”

Like Dickens, Callow is both writer and performer. His next book, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, will be published in February to mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth. Has Callow ever considered trying his hand at fiction? “I am going to start soon,” he reveals, “but it’s taken a lot of time to have the courage to do so. I’ve never seen myself as someone who made up stories. I like telling stories, but more or less telling it how it happened. Creating fictional universes has so far been beyond my scope.”

Storytelling has not changed since Shakespeare’s time, he says. “The stories we tell each other have changed because our world is utterly different. But the art of storytelling, in my view, hasn’t changed at all. The audience feels – at least it’s my job to make them feel this way – immersed. They fall silent like babes in arms. They snuggle up, suspending their normal lives and submitting to the spell.” And the stories in Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, he says, are “right up Richmond’s street”.

Callow should know. A familiar face at Richmond, whether treading the boards as Shakespeare or walking the plank as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, he was recently photographed for a national newspaper profile looking most at home in the dressing room.

“I’ve never done a show there which I haven’t enjoyed,” he says. “Richmond is metropolitan and yet at the same time more relaxed than the metropolis. There’s a feeling that the audience have not had to come through the hell of public transport to be there. They stroll across that lovely green and are ready to be transported into another world. And that’s what we all hope for. That’s what it’s about.”

Dr Marigold and Mr Chips, Richmond Theatre, 12-18 September, www.atgtickets.com/richmond

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