Theatre and Dance Previews

John Savident is a very charming man. He has been in the business since 1961 and his theatre knowledge is immense.

A former policeman, he got into professional acting after being a keen amateur, and since the early 1960s has appeared in a variety of theatre, TV and film and worked with such greats as Laurence Olivier and Stanley Kubrick.

In 1994 he became very well-known to TV audiences as butcher Fred Elliott in Coronation Street, a part he played for 12 years.

Hobson's Choice

He's now back on stage in the acclaimed Chichester Festival Theatre production of the classic English comedy Hobson's Choice, where he plays another Lancashire shopkeeper, Henry Hobson. Set in Salford in 1880 it's the story of a cantankerous and obstinate boot shop owner who tries to get the better of his three daughters, by saying that there are to be 'no marriages' in order to avoid the expense of a dowry.

With over 40 years in the business, working in film, TV and theatre he has many a story to tell and tell them he does, moving effortlessly from anecdote to anecdote about actors from Colin Baker to Laurence Olivier, barely pausing for breath. It's fascinating - you light the blue touch paper and he’s off – theatre, politics, life everything. Except one thing – and that was only told to me on the way to his dressing room for the interview!

“You have been told that John doesn’t like being asked about Coronation Street, haven’t you?!” said the PR girl.

“Ummmm .... no, I haven’t” I replied, rapidly re-ordering, re-writing and deleting questions in my head! Great!

The thing is, I know that it would be rude to harp on about Fred Elliot for the whole of the interview when the man has done so much, so I had planned to ask a lot of stuff before getting on to Corrie. But nevertheless, I would have to ask him somehow. John played Fred Elliott for 12 years, in a show watched by literally millions of people. If I didn’t mention it, I was going to look a bit stupid!

So, after then being told that I had to wait for him to mention it, I spent the interview phrasing questions that might lead him to Corrie without asking directly and him not even mentioning its name. I hadn't even wanted to ask that much about it beforehand - but now it was a quest, a challenge!

But first and foremost we were there to talk about the play, and that's where we started.

Hobson's Choice is about a man and his three daughters and in order to avoid providing a dowry, he has told them they can't get married?

John: He doesn't mind paying for a wedding but it's the settlements. The man is not mean, he is in a good old fashioned Northern sense, careful with money. He doesn't pay his daughters wages, he can't see why [he needs to] because he keeps them, he feeds and dresses them, but that's where the trouble starts because the young girls decide they're going to dress in the latest fashions. He's always tried to put them in their places but, as he says, they grow more and more 'uppish' and they start to answer back and they don't listen to his words of wisdom. 

1915 was the height of the suffragette movement and the play is set in 1880 in Salford which was where the suffragette movement started. Whether he [playwright Harold Brighouse] intended to reflect it in this play I don't know but certainly it is reflected there. The whole idea is that this man is very much of his time. It was very much a society where men ruled and were in charge. The women of course, quite rightly, did the cleaning and looked after the kids. Bring it back I say, bring it back!

He is extremely important in his local area and a successful businessman, but the actual power behind the throne of course is Maggie, his eldest daughter who is 30 and unmarried. I always assume that Maggie was in fact very much like his wife and she was the power behind the throne when she was alive.

Hobson's Choice

A story of a father and his three daughters sounds a little bit like King Lear?

John: Oh yes - everybody's said that! Somebody once said "I'm in the Lancashire King Lear" and it is that! I play it slightly differently to a lot of people I'm told. A lot of times it's played as the Lancashire comedy and that's it. To me it's a play much deeper than that. I really do think it's a great play and not just a Lancashire comedy. I can't get my head round the fact that people say 'serve him right' when he gets his come-uppance. I think that the sting that they pull on him [at the end] is the most awful way of treating him and I feel so sorry for the man. What kind of a future has he got? They have destroyed the man and I think it is so sad. At the end, although it is very funny, I do play it very seriously.

You seem to have a lot of sympathy for him but do you like him?

John: I love him. I look forward to playing him, and I have such fun. Considering I haven't done theatre for quite a long time, it's restored my faith in the greatness of theatre, not that it ever went of course, but I'd forgotten the thrill when you've got a good part and I don't get fed up of playing him. It's such a great play and it's such a wonderful part and it doesn't matter how ill I feel or if I'm moaning, when I'm on there and Hobson starts to take over I'm so glad to be doing it. I'm having such fun.

Obviously you've had a long stint on TV so has it been a difficult transition to go back to the stage?

John: No it hasn't, I feared that it would be. I thought I might have lost my voice, my projection, but no , I didn't. I think Mr Hobson came to rescue me. I didn't want to do him because it was another Northern role and I'd had quite enough of Northern roles thank you very much. But I did a lot of social research as well as doing the play itself and the transition worried me, but then it didn't, because I knew this man before I started rehearsals.

Was it refreshing researching a new character after playing another one for so long?

John: No, because I was doing what I'd always done in the past. I was just doing what this generation of actors always did. I was always a great believer in research because when you do social history you find out some wonderful bits of business.

The unfortunate thing was at the beginning at Chichester, I was having a very bad time and on the second night I totally went to pieces. I discovered that I had diabetes and I must have had it for a long time. I was doing all the wrong things, like eating chocolate to get the energy back up, and doughnuts and vanilla slices and drinking water. I peed enough to irrigate the Gobi desert! But this was affecting the way I was working and I thought I can't do it anymore and that frightened me. I'd done all the research and learned the lines before I started rehearsals and at the first preview I thought "I'll show them" and of course it didn't happen like that.

But it's all under control now?

John: Oh yes, yes. But I was on the verge of ringing my agent and saying I'm not doing it. 

John in Dial M for Murder (1974)

Do you ever give the young actors you work with advice from your wealth of experience?

John: Well no, but I do occasionally, if I feel they're going to be receptive. But I'm a dinosaur and they have totally different attitudes to what I had when I came into the business in 1961. One had a great deal of respect for the older actors but the business isn't like that anymore. Television is king. Now, to mention a programme I used to be in, people come in out of youth clubs in Stockport or Manchester, anywhere in this endless dumbing down process, and they don't want to be the finest Hamlet of their generation, they want to be famous and now they admit it as for quite a while they tried to disguise it.

They just want to be [in these programmes] because then they can appear in those ghastly magazines, all those celebrity based magazines. I ran a mile when Hello wanted me to be in it - I said this is nothing to do with acting.

But a lot of these people are not theatre people, they don't seem to have been brought up in theatre traditions and the feeling of love for the theatre. There are one or two throwbacks I've met and it's so nice when you see an actor who knows and is interested in something about theatre history. But I was talking to one lad at Granada and he'd never heard of Laurence Olivier! They're not interested, they just want to be celebrities. They are just not interested in something about where we've all come from, which used to fascinate me.

Even when I was a kid and a local amateur, I knew who David Garrick was, and I knew that Henry Irving was our first theatrical knight because people talked about it, even in the amateur world. I'd get The Stage and Plays and Players and Theatre World and read was was going on in London avidly.

I take it you'd never be seen in a reality TV programme then?!

John: I've been asked to do Celebrity Come Dancing twice and I have told them exactly what I think. It stands for everything I loathe about British television. It's extremely popular and I despair.

You've done film, TV and theatre - I was going to ask where your heart is but I have inkling it's theatre?

John: Well, I think so but I have to say, going round the provinces on this tour there are some theatres where I've thought on more than one occasion what the hell am I doing this for? Because some of the theatres - I don't know why they don't just pull the damn things down and put them out of their misery. And I suddenly think to myself, 'what is the point? I don't need the money, I don't need the work, why should I get to a theatre and upset myself?'

So what does keep you going then?

John: It's the enjoyment. Showing off I suppose. And when you get a character like Hobson.

John Savident in Middlemarch (1994)

Part of the motivation [to do this] was the surprise I got about what a great play this was. I read it and I thought this is the Lancashire comedy and I don't think it's very funny, I think it's very sad. And then you start to work on it and you suddenly realise what a great play this is and then you lose yourself in the character.

That's the sort of thing [that keeps you going] and you hear laughter, that's another great thing, but then you get as much satisfaction out of doing an absolutely serious play where you're playing with people's emotions. I don't know what it is, it's a strange thing that you sort of change yourself and live another life. It's being in a different world, it's playing a character of great interest and being somebody else and it's also, depending on the play, the love of words. There are wonderful words and ideas to say and it's a great thrill to be able to say them, bring them to life and hopefully convert somebody.

Is having a live audience more satisfying as well?

John: Sometimes! The audience at the Lowry in Salford were unbelievable, you really didn't have to do any work because they were there with you - this is their play. But with some audiences you think why am I doing this? Can't they see?! People say that it's not the audience's fault it's the actors fault but I don't agree with that. In a great many cases it is the actor's fault but with a show that's as tight and as good as this one. it ain't the actors' fault! But, having said that, at the end of the show even though the audience have been sitting there like lumpen lumps of pudding, the reception is amazing, huge, they stand up and they cheer, it's extraordinary. But it just doesn't help when you're doing the play if they're a bit schtum about the whole thing!