DT: Where? The National?

RGC: The National and the West End in the 70s, as a boy. My love of theatre grew from that and my parents love of theatre as well, and then I acted at University. I met my wife in an audition (laughs)

DT: Wow!

RGC:…and both of us have acted since we graduated. We both thought about going professional. We both decided not to at the time and we both got very heavily involved with the biggest non-professional Theatre company in the UK, the Questors Theatre in Ealing. I've now done 37 years; she’s done 35 years there. But more recently over the last few years, like many people involved in theatre, the merger between amateur and professional has blurred a lot and we're now doing more semi-professional work.

And just before lockdown we actually launched our own theatre company - perfect timing!

DT: Oh! Wow. Called what? 

RGC: Playgc Theatre Company, and we were due to do our first show at the Playground Theatre in White City in July; a new play about Alzheimer's, a two-hander featuring myself and my wife and that has been postponed. But we hope that will be staged at Playground in in April next year.

DT: And is that you with a professional hat on then?

RGC: Yeah

DT: So you will be paying yourself?

RGC: Well, if we make…in the current climate, David, making any money from any production when only 25 to 30% of the audience can come is a challenge! I've been to see a couple of shows at the Salisbury Playhouse in the last two weeks. They were a one man show, a comedian, and a singer songwriter with a very small band on stage, so you know the large-scale productions are not viable as we know from the press reports, and it is a challenge so many of my friends who are full time professional actors. It is a really, really challenging and tough time for them and I feel for them deeply at the moment.

But I've been lucky enough to do one show just recently. I sent you the photographs about Six Bad Poets, a show we premiered at the Playground Theatre last year…

DT: Christopher Reid…

RGC: …By Christopher Reid, who wrote Song for Lunch. And then we did a four night fundraiser at the Questors Theatre last month. It was extraordinary walking on stage having been rehearsing with Covid rules and then an audience of 80 dotted around a 300 seat theatre with masks on, in bubbles of one and two.

DT: Wow.

RGC: In the last two shows I've done there, which were Pride and Prejudice and 1984 we had 300 and the place was packed. And then to come out to that… but, BUT, the great thing was there was an audience, they enjoyed it, it was a night out for them. In fact on the first night of Six Bad Poets, we realised that the Questors Theatre, even during the war, had never been dark for six months. Back in the war they started doing shows within about a month of war starting, so this is quite an unusual break, like many theatres, to be dark that long.

DT: Was its faintly ironic doing 1984 at this time?

RGC: It was. We did 1984 this time last year, and of course since then… but yes, the messaging and the issues that 1984 threw up and continues to throw up as a great play resonate today. Next month, we’re reprising a play we did at the Jermyn Street Theatre in the West End in 2016, a two-week run we did of a play called The Letter of Last Resort which I think Peter Murray came to see, amongst other people. We’re doing that again at the Questors Theatre to raise money for the theatre, over five performances. 

My wife Lisa is playing the Prime Minister in that and I play a civil servant. It's based on the true story, David, that each Prime Minister, when they become PM has to write the letter with the instructions that goes in the safe in the Trident submarines which the captain of whichever Trident submarine is underwater, if and when a nuclear attack kicks off, has to open the safe and read the instructions of what to do.

The play is about the first night of the Prime Minister and this strange civil servant comes in and tells her: Prime Minister you need to write this, and the play is about what she might write.

DT: And, spoiler alert, is the letter spelled out, as it were? Is it read out?

RGC: Well you’ll have to come along to find out! It’s on the 3rd to the 6th December I think it is - five performances. But it's a very, very clever play and we got the rights to it in 2016. We did it there and then Roger Madelin (of British Land) enjoyed it so much that when he saw it at the Jermyn Street Theatre he paid to re-stage it at the Printworks in Canada Water in 2017 for three nights. A large number of British Land associates contacts and friends came to see the performances. And there’s your crossover between work and my other life! It was quite an extraordinary three nights. But I was really touched that Roger and Emma Cariaga wanted to see it staged there and it went down really well actually when we did it at the Printworks.

DT: Do you feel that you draw upon some of your thespian qualities when you're, for instance, making presentations or interviews etc? Do you feel it's a help?

RGC: Yes, I think it probably is, because the ability to feel relatively relaxed when you're presenting… I mean Tony Travers and I as you know have probably done, I don't know, 200 presentations together over the last 20 years.

DT: Yeah. I've seen many of them! 

RGC: We still feel inside that we're not complacent at all and haven't been over the years because we know that if people are bothering to listen to us, we've got to work hard and make sure we present well. But having an acting background does help undeniably David. But I will never forget that Mark Reynolds from Mace, the chief exec, came to see that Letter of Last Resort and he said to me afterwards: ‘how do you do that, because I couldn't imagine doing that’. I reminded him that he is an Olympic standard swimmer. And I said to him: ‘how are you so good at swimming?”.  And he said: ‘Because I practice every day’. And I said: ‘Well, they're just different muscles. The brain is a muscle and if you practice enough you get good at rehearsing as an actor and at your craft in the same way that you get good at any hobby – painting, swimming, sailing whatever it is you do. Cycling in your case – you’re a great cyclist; I couldn't do what you do without a lot of practice. So it's no different in that sense. But its crossover to the work helps and I'm very touched that a number of clients, friends of mine and associate friends of mine have come to see shows and enjoyed them. I’m very touched by that.

DT: Last question, but you’ve partially answered it. Do you fear for the theatre across the capital? And, as an associated question to that, is enough being done? What can be done?

RGC: Well this comes back actually partly to the world of NLA. I went to the Salisbury Playhouse, which is quite a modern, large theatre, and they have taken out every other row of seats in the main playhouse. They reduced the capacity by half and then spaced everybody out, so they seat about 100 people in a theatre that I think traditionally has had 500 seats. But they’ve actually taken out half the seats. With some of the Victorian Frank Matcham theatres that is not so easy to do, and it is quite complicated to reconfigure the classical theatres in the West End. And even if you reconfigure the main space, those West End theatre toilets are not exactly large and the bars are not exactly large. It is very challenging to change the physical nature of some of those wonderful Victorian theatres that we all know and love.

For some other spaces it is a lot easier and many theatres now have reopened and are applying a code of rules. But you come back to the economics of it and that's the biggest fear. It was hard enough to make much money in most theatres across the country before Covid, and it's a lot harder today. So yes, it is a big concern. But the theatre, like many arts that are incredibly creative has a lot of very determined people out there, and let's hope that next year we can see a return to more traditional form of enjoying theatre and the other art forms than we have the moment.

I would just add by the way as a rider to that though, I think it's extremely disappointing the government don't seem to trust rugby and football to allow a reasonable number of fans in to watch rugby and football when they do allow that for theatre.

DT: And cricket!

RGC: And cricket as well! I think that is wrong and I think it is a great shame but the government had not allowed that. Harlequins ran a very successful 2,500 fan test event against Bath back in September at the Stoop. It ran very well, the council was very happy with it. The government appeared very happy with it. Yet for the rest of the rugby season that we have just completed we had empty stadia and I think that is a great shame. It's a pity we couldn't have found a way of doing that.

DT: Well, I hope to see you on stage or actually in NLA soon, Robert, so thank you for your time.

RGC: That’s lovely. Lovely to speak to you. Thank you. Bye.