Bosses at the Royal Opera House have opened their cultured doors this season to a man whose reputation is built on exposing the ludicrous truth about bastions of the establishment. Were they mad? Has there been some mistake?
But Chris Addison, the comedian, actor and director who starred in the hit political comedy The Thick of It, is not training his satirical sights on the institution. He is far too excited at just being inside it.
“It is fascinating here. It is the busiest place in the world! I had no idea,” he says breathlessly, in a break from rehearsals for a new opera. “The Royal Ballet School is next door, so constantly there are intimidating young things wandering about, wearing leg warmers, the lot. There are always productions in rehearsal and members of at least four casts wandering around. It is an extraordinary building too. Because it is on a corner, you don’t realise how big it is from the outside.”
Addison, 44, who played the nervy and unscrupulous Ollie Reeder in the BBC2 show and who, in September, received a director’s Emmy award for the top-ranked US comedy Veep, has been hired to play a key role in a new production of the French opera L’etoile.
“I had gone public defending opera, and at the time Covent Garden was looking for a comic actor for this newly created speaking part. They must have thought I might do it cheaper. My first concern was if I had time to take it on. It would have been too heartbreaking otherwise.”
Since his success with Veep, a sitcom starring Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a hapless politician, Selina Meyer, Addison has had to navigate a transatlantic working life.
“When you are filming on a show like Veep, there are always bits of filming to pick up later, so I am supposed to be going out to the east coast soon to film some exteriors for season five.”
His young self, growing up in Manchester, would have been more shocked to learn he would one day direct Louis-Dreyfus than that he would be appearing at Covent Garden.
“You could have conceived of ways you could end up on this stage, it’s in England for a start, but I would have been amazed about Julia. She has been a hero of mine. I loved Seinfeld and when I was writing the sitcom Lab Rats for the BBC with Carl Cooper we would watch a blooper reel online of Julia and Jerry Seinfeld giggling on set. It is so beguiling and so funny, we used it to cheer ourselves up. I called Carl a few years ago to say, I am on set with Julia and she can’t go on for giggling.”
Addison, who began life as a standup, found his way into opera at Glyndebourne after paying a sceptical visit with the parents of his girlfriend, now his wife. He is now a devoted fan and evangelical about convincing others that opera is neither “hard work” nor snob-ridden.
“I say do anything you can to make it popular, but it is hard because there is a big hump to get over, despite the fact people inherently like the music. Nessun Dorma wasn’t a hit just because people like football, it was a hit because it was a beautiful piece of music sung incredibly well by a genius. People love opera tunes, they just don’t come out to see it because there is this snobbish association.”
The equally widespread assumption that tickets are prohibitively expensive sends him apoplectic: “It seems mental to me. It is purely not getting the message out there, plus a lot of the popular image comes from films like Moonstruck and Pretty Woman. People imagine it is all dickie bows. I have seen great stuff here; paid £6 and sat at the back. True, there are top price tickets I would never buy, but there are super-expensive seats at Arsenal too. You could come to four operas for the price of an Arsenal ticket and have two quid over for a lovely cup of coffee.”
Yet Addison’s role in L’etoile, by Emmanuel Chabrier, is not part of a campaign to promote opera. It is clearly sheer pleasure. “This opera, although relatively unknown, is joyfully silly,” he says, adding that the tunes are “incredibly catchy”.
“It luxuriates in its insane plot, even by opera standards. Within 10 years it will be properly in the repertoire, I think, because it is brilliant and because a few places – Frankfurt, Amsterdam – have done it recently,” Addison enthuses. “It is more like operetta, because there are long stretches of speech. It is also close to panto, because there is a principal boy and a tyrant king in a far-off land. It is lunatic and anachronistic, so even though it takes place in the Orient, the characters drink green chartreuse and there are people running a department store. It is a big crazy mish-mash of fun.”
Addison is to appear alongside singing stars including American Kate Lindsey – a name that caused a stir among the Veep cast. “When I got this job with Kate, Anna Chlumsky, who plays Amy and who is an opera obsessive, went crazy.”
Addison will be paired on stage with French actor Jean-Luc Vincent as Smith and Dupont, dual commentators on the plot. “You don’t quite know what level of reality they are operating on, but they get drawn in. I am in costume as a proper actor, rather than a comic turn, although I do play a hidebound Englishman, so we meet at some point.”
The comic is enjoying the incongruity of preparing to face a Covent Garden crowd. “I am used to trying things out in a smaller, safer environment and you don’t get the opportunity to do that first here. There are extraordinary challenges in opera, to do with delivery. A lot of things I have spent 20 years learning, I am having to unlearn. I am used to being in a church hall with tape stuck on the floor for the set. But they have rehearsal rooms here big enough to fit the whole set, which helps. And you have Sir Mark Elder too!”
There is incongruity to savour as well when Addison has to tell Hollywood TV colleagues why he is not around. “It is quite hard to get across. I say, ‘I am on stage at Covent Garden,’ and they say ‘Sorry, what? The line is breaking up’.”
Observing the fight for presidential nominations in the states, Addison says the key personalities are not really relevant for the scriptwriters of Veep, a show created, like The Thick of It, by Armando Iannucci.
“Those characters, Trump, Palin, Sanders and Clinton, we don’t go anywhere near all that, because we are interested in process. People imagine that satire is about individuals, but the best stuff isn’t really. With The Thick of It everyone was obsessed with the idea that Malcolm Tucker [Peter Capaldi’s spin doctor character] was Alastair Campbell, although Peter had never seen Campbell and had based Tucker on the behaviour of Hollywood agents he knew of. Both shows are about the political machine, which is much more interesting, satisfying and significant to look at.”
Has this stint, away from politics, rehearsing in costume at Covent Garden lured Addison back to the world of performing? Well, he admits that watching “the best cast in the world doing their thing” in Veep has made him wonder if he can act again. If, however, he was ever offered the choice between a West End stage role or the chance to direct a film, Addison has no hesitation in reaching for the hypothetical film. “Not least, because I would get to control my time a bit more and see my children,” he says. The comedian has two children of school age and his working life can be brutal, he complains. “You start down a path in your 20s and then you get a family and you find you have locked yourself into a career that doesn’t take much account of them.”
All the same, the chance to direct a feature film would evidently be some compensation. “I had a lot to learn about directing on Veep because it is such a large-scale show, with the physical size of the cast and crew and all the sets,” he says. So could a feature film on the scale of, say, the Thor franchise be on the cards? “No, I don’t think so. If it was, I would strongly recommend you don’t go and see it.”
Possibly then a smaller-scale satire on the inside workings of a revered British cultural venue such as Covent Garden.
