As Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses comes to Kingston, Charles Raspin meets one of its stars, Rufus Hound – the actor and stand-up comedian with a revolutionary bent
With its mad kings, bloody battles and muddied allegiances, the period in British history known as the Wars of the Roses might seem familiar to fans of Game of Thrones. However, as with so many great stories, Shakespeare got there first.
The Bard’s portrayal of those troubled times spans four plays: Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III, which in 1963 were distilled down into a trilogy, and performed to great acclaim. This month they’re being restaged for the first time, as The Wars of the Roses at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, with the celebrated director Sir Trevor Nunn at the helm.
Given the plays’ grim subject matter, it might surprise some to find TV comedian and local star Rufus Hound in the cast. After all, perhaps his best-known theatrical role has been the dim-witted Francis Henshall, hero of One Man Two Guvnors, a role he inherited from James Corden.
“I saw James on stage, and I thought that part was totally suited to a stand-up comic. They'd breeze through it,” he notes, wryly. “Six months later a phone rings, and suddenly I’m auditioning.”
Is Rufus now making a deliberate shift towards serious theatre?
“Oh, no, don’t put it like that,” he groans. “It’s got an awful flavour; like I’m trying to rebrand myself. I’m not. I grew up loving theatre, and I always wanted to be part of the gang that told those stories. The chance to do Shakespeare with Trevor Nunn came up, and I’d have to be some sort of idiot to turn that down. It’s no more planned than that, really.”
“What I’ve found I love about the theatre is being part of a great team of people, who are all on the same page, for that one perfect night. That’s what you need on stage, or it all falls apart.”
Rufus (centre), in rehearsal with Oliver Cotton (right) and Kåre Conradi (left)
Does he miss stand-up comedy?
“I miss stand-up comedians,” he replies, after a pause. “I miss spending a lot of time with very funny men and women. The rest of it? Not so much.”
“Mind you, the last gig I did was at The Comedy Store in London. I finished the show thinking that a performance on that stage was the highest point I’d hoped for when I started, and now I’d done it. Unbeknownst to me, standing backstage was Eddie Izzard, one of my biggest heroes. I told him what a coincidence it was – that someone who inspired me would be there on my last night. He just laughed and said no-one quits being a stand-up. You’re just a stand-up doing other things – you’ll always come back.”
As we speak, Rufus has just finished filming Beautiful Devils, a modern retelling of Othello, another Shakespeare play, through the lens of a young band newly signed to a record company. He’s also guest-starred in an episode of Doctor Who, which will hit our screens this month.
“Comparing stage and screen is like asking which is more difficult, sprint or marathon. It’s a different way of working,” he says. “Dr Who was amazing fun: you run screaming down an empty corridor then, much later, you watch the scene and go, ‘Oh, so that’s what we were running from’, after they’ve added a 50-foot hellworm. I’ve been writing endless letters since we finished filming, trying to suggest how my character might return for another episode!”
Rufus Hound as Jack Cade, rallying the "scum of Kent"
Rufus plays four parts in The Wars of the Roses, but his favourite is Jack Cade, the revolutionary of Henry VI, Part 2, whose very literal stab at politics struck a chord.
“When I bang on about unfairness in society, there are always very smart people ready to tell me that I’m an idiot, because human nature means we can’t live in a world where everything’s fair. I think we can. Or at least, we have to try.”
“If you listen to Jack Cade, he makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, he’s an idiot. He hasn’t been to the right schools and he doesn’t know how to hold a sword properly... but he does know there’s enough to go around. He knows that life should be fairer. So I feel a kinship with Cade. I’m happy to bring him to the stage. He’s a butcher, but his heart’s in the right place. You can play him as a complete twonk, but I think he’s got the right spirit.”
Rufus’s beard is a major part of his image, but he shaved it off for Guvnors. Will he be bereft of whiskers as Cade, too?
“When you’re playing multiple roles, they can’t all have the same facial hair – so the beard will be gone,” he sighs. “I was hoping for all manner of wigs and fake noses and so on, but it turns out that you can’t kit everyone out like that when you’re doing Shakespeare with about fifty people.”
So instead, Rufus will just have to ‘think beard’.
“There’s always a degree of cooperation between audience and actors,” he agrees. “It’s a sort of willing deception. When you don’t have 50,000 soldiers to hand, the audience fills in the gaps of a battle scene. Trevor read us a speech from Henry V, given before the performance, with a line that hit on it exactly: ‘We play now upon your imaginary senses.’”
Rufus alongside co-star Joely Richardson and director Sir Trevor Nunn
His roles in The Wars of the Roses arguably bring Rufus full circle – he originally dreamed of a theatrical career, only to suffer the one-two punch of an antagonistic drama teacher and the onset of legal drinking age.
“I was bored and 18, so yeah, I spent a lot of time in the pub,” he says. “That led to stand-up comedy, where I learned that, yeah, I could handle the stage. And now I’m doing Shakespeare at the Rose! Shows what my teacher knew.”
Rufus grew up in Woking and went to college in Godalming, so at this point in the interview I should be asking the local lad what it's like to return home triumphant – except that he lives in Hampton, so he never really left.
“I always believed I’d live and work in London,” he says, elaborating on
Dick Whittington-esque ambitions. “That was where it was all happening. I left home at 19, and I lived all over the city. North London, South London, West, East... Then I married and we couldn’t afford to live there, so we kept moving outwards until we ended up in Isleworth. Then we moved out again, to Hampton, when we needed a school.”
“Of course, in my mind, I’d still struck out and gone to London and found my destiny and all the rest of it... but one day I spent £23 on a cab to Woking. I realised I’d only moved about 10 miles from where I grew up!”
The Wars of the Roses is at Kingston's Rose Theatre until Oct 31
