DICKENS AT PITLOCHRY

Inverness-born actor JIMMY CHISHOLM talks about his acclaimed performance as novelist Charles Dickens, part of the summer season at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

THE SHOW is called Charles Dickens: The Haunted Heart, and it was really the idea of the director, Ian Grieve. He was keen to do a one-man show with me, but I said that would depend on the show – I had done one before, and knew from experience that it can be a helluva struggle for very little reward.
 

Jimmy Chisholm (right) with Guy Fearon in 'Double Indemnity'

We looked through a load of scripts, but nothing gripped me, until the theatre suggested we commission something. We approached the writer John Clifford about Dickens. He is a big, big expert on Dickens, and was very interested. He turned up what seemed like two weeks later with a full play.
 

We read it, and it was exactly what I DIDN’T want in a Dickens play! It was one where Charles Dickens basically comes on and reads sections from his books, and I said to John that I really wasn’t looking for that approach. We had talked a bit at the earlier meeting about Dickens, and what I was interested in was the kind of stuff about the man himself that had come out of John’s research.
 

He told me a story, for example, about one time when Dickens’s daughter was ill, and he had put her down to sleep in his work room. She awoke in a fever, and heard all these voices in the room, and as she came to she realised that it was her father speaking dialogue from his work into a mirror. He was doing the voices and wearing makeup and everything, just to see if he believed the words himself.
 

It was that kind of story I wanted in the play, although it's not really a play in the conventional sense. There are excerpts from his books in it, but hopefully when I'm doing it right you won't know when I'm speaking as Dickens the character or quoting from his books.
 

He went through a lot of very hard experiences in his childhood that are reflected in his books, and that was a major part of what made him the writer he was. He suffered for his father's sins as an embezzler -- the whole family were all put in debtor's prison as a result, and he had to go out and work to pay off the debt. Because of his own childhood he was desperate to protect children from the greed and misfortune and misadventure of adults.
 

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