As he appears in a musical for the first time, Olivier Award-winner Adrian Scarborough tells Caroline Bishop why performing in a quintessentially English period piece with an animatronic pig is very much his cup of tea.
It is pleasingly apt that an actor who grew up in Melton Mowbray, the home of the much enjoyed pork pie of the same name, should now be appearing in a musical which features a pig in a starring role.
In fact Adrian Scarborough remembers being taken by his parents to the Regal cinema in Melton to see A Private Function, the 1984 Alan Bennett film upon which the new musical Betty Blue Eyes is based. In it, Maggie Smith and Michael Palin spent much time grappling with the several live pigs who were employed to play Betty, the sow being illegally reared to provide ration-beating fodder for a party celebrating the royal nuptials of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip in 1947.
“It’s just such a wonderful, quirky, silly story,” says Scarborough, who plays Bill Paterson’s role in the new musical adaptation, that of Ministry of Food inspector Wormold, who spends the show chasing after Betty and her fatteners. However, he is grateful that producer Cameron Mackintosh didn’t decide to use live pigs on stage. “When they were filming the movie, those wretched pigs, they drove everybody to complete and utter distraction.”
Instead, Betty Blue Eyes stars a state of the art animatronic pig developed in Australia by John Cox’s Creature Workshop, the company behind another famous pig, Babe, star of the 1995 film. This stage Betty offers porcine perfection: all the cuteness with none of the mess or bad behaviour. “The pig! The pig’s phenomenal,” gushes Scarborough when we meet backstage at the Novello theatre. The misty-eyed glaze and goofy smile that accompany these words attest that the actor has become more than a little enamoured by his snout-nosed co-star. “Nobody looks at anything else so I’m mightily relieved I don’t have a number with the pig. It’s gorgeous, it’s absolutely to die for. You just look at her and you just completely fall in love, she’s so lifelike.”
“I’ve never been a great one for pressure. I don’t respond well to that”
In fact, Betty has such a meaty (sorry) role in the show that they built more than one of her, allowing for some vital repair time. When we speak the musical is still in previews yet Scarborough says one of the porkers has already been sent to be “rehaired”, a case, he feels, of too much loving. “I imagine she will need continual attention just because she gets a lot of wear and tear. There’s a lot of stroking going on, how can you not? We’ve all been told that absolutely under no circumstances are we to touch any of the pigs, but every now and again… you just have to know what it feels like!”
I get the feeling that a bit of repair time for the human cast members wouldn’t go amiss, either. Performing in a musical is a first for Scarborough, who is better known for his award-winning appearances in dramas and comedies on stage – he recently won an Olivier Award for Terence Rattigan’s After The Dance at the National Theatre – as well as a wealth of television and film including Gavin And Stacey, Upstairs Downstairs and Gosford Park. “It’s the hardest I think I’ve ever worked on anything, just because it’s physically very exhausting, it’s very tough on the vocal chords,” he says of the musical. However, though the demands of the preview period have “squeezed my brain to melon-twisting proportions”, the rewards of venturing into musical territory more than compensate. “The buzz is amazing. And the days where you kind of go ‘I haven’t got any energy, I don’t know where I’m going to be able to drag this up from’, the band kicks off and you just hear the audience and suddenly you just come alive.”
It wasn’t Scarborough’s connection with Bennett that brought him to Betty. Though the pair had worked together on Bennett’s The Habit Of Art at the National Theatre and the film version of The History Boys, the playwright has had little involvement with this musical. (Will he like it? “I think it will make him smile inside, yes,” says Scarborough cautiously.) Rather, it was his acquaintance with the show’s composer George Stiles that led to Scarborough’s involvement. “We met at this social occasion and we were chatting about what we were up to and I saw this flash of a twinkle pass over his eyes and I thought ‘mmm, I wonder if he’s thinking something’.”
Indeed he was, eyeing Scarborough for the part of Wormwold, the meat inspector who is trying to clamp down on the villagers’ pursuit of illegal rations. The stage adaptation demanded a less subtle characterisation than in the film, says Scarborough, so the show’s American writers, along with Stiles and lyricist Anthony Drewe, have made Wormold into more of a villain; much to Scarborough’s delight, he usually gets booed at the curtain call. “He has strange psychiatric tendencies, which are not altogether healthy. He’s just a bit mad and a bit off the wall and a bit odd. I suppose George must have looked at me and thought ‘he looks good fodder’.”
The prospect appealed to Scarborough, too. He has “always wanted to be a song-and-dance man” ever since his drama school training at Bristol Old Vic where he found himself in “quite a musical year”. However it is fair to say that he is not an obvious choice for a West End musical, indeed Richard Eyre’s production is notable for a principal cast – including Sarah Lancashire and Reece Shearsmith – who are known more for their dramatic output than their infrequent musical outings. Scarborough puts this down to the nature of the very idiosyncratically English, very character-led story being told. “It’s important, I suppose, that the acting that substantiates all of the music is very deep and very thorough, because I think that is the only way that it works. A certain amount of character depth is definitely required and called for, and also an ability perhaps to really invest in the acting side of things.”
“It’s the hardest I think I’ve ever worked on anything, just because it’s physically very exhausting”
In that, the team have come up trumps in Scarborough, who excels in finding depths in supporting, character parts. From surreal clown Mr Jolly in TV’s Psychoville – co-written by Shearsmith – to henpecked neighbour Pete in Gavin And Stacey, Scarborough is more interested in flawed or quirky character parts than in flashy leading roles, a preference which also gives him room to breathe. “I’m sort of happier not bearing the full weight of the show. On the occasions that I have done that I’ve found it quite exhausting. I’ve never been a great one for pressure. I don’t respond well to that.”
His recent Olivier Award came for playing a character described as “fat, hurtling towards 40 and somebody who has really let himself go, a leech essentially. I read the first scene and thought ‘oh that’s just delicious, how fantastic’.” Reading After The Dance was, he says, a “Damascun moment”; he had been planning to leave the National after appearing in a run of productions there, but instead he put himself forward for the role of John, got the job and now, following an acclaimed performance and that Olivier win, is headed to Broadway with the production next year.
Appearing in English period pieces has become something of a specialism. “The ‘30s and ‘40s seem to work very well with me somehow, I don’t know why.” After The Dance was the latest of his stage appearances to be set in the 1930s, following The Habit Of Art and Time And The Conways, also at the National. A recent brief appearance in Oscar-winning period film The King’s Speech preceded his foray into post-war, austerity Britain for Betty Blue Eyes.
Later this year he will go back to the 1930s as Mr Pritchard, the butler in the BBC’s lavish updating of Upstairs Downstairs, which received three episodes over Christmas and now returns for a six-part series.
Scarborough is pleased to have the chance to return to a television series that has proved its popularity and “investigate those relationships a little bit deeper”. While he understands the financial motivations behind three episode testers, the increasing trend does not exactly make him a pig in clover. “The bum side of that is if you never give anything more than three bloody episodes worth of opportunity how on earth is it ever going to expand and broaden itself? So many things are slow burners. It takes writers time to get into their stride, it takes actors lots of time to get into their stride.”
“Nobody looks at anything else so I’m mightily relieved I don’t have a number with the pig”
His intention, in a few years, to “start to play a bigger role in Equity” indicates the strength of his opinion on the subject, which he expounds upon off the record. It is fair to say that Scarborough believes in giving creativity room to flourish. “Being creative is reading something like Betty Blue Eyes… it’s Cameron Mackintosh going ‘right, I’ve read this fantastic thing, I’ve heard the music, I think it’s brilliant, I’ve got a hunch and I’m going to lob millions of quid at it because that’s how confident I feel in the product.’ That’s what it’s about.” Do we need more risk-takers like Mackintosh? “We bloody do.”
It will be Pritchard who will take him away from Betty – “I shall be sad to go if I’m still feeling the way I am about it now” – but Scarborough won’t mind spending more time in the company of the fastidious butler. “I like that; that goes with my OCD character. A place for everything and everything in its place, I’ve always been like that. I don’t like mess. I like to keep things nice and tidy.”
This propensity for neatness is one reason Scarborough isn’t – despite his love for Betty – a big fan of animals as pets. He has denied his daughter a dog because he feels the responsibility for walking it would come down to him. Perhaps, I suggest, he should take a Betty with him when he leaves the musical. “Maybe that would be the best way forward, have a little Betty somewhere, you never have to clean up after and you could just plug in every now and again.” So if Mackintosh suddenly finds himself short a pig, he will know where to look.
CB