A place to update visitors with the latest news and information about Christopher Eccleston and his work and also to inform visitors about any updates/additions to my Chris related website.
The 1963 Walter Tevis novel went on to inspire the acclaimed 1976 movie which starred David Bowie. More recently, it was also the basis of Prime Video's 2022 seriesof the same name which starred Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy and Naomie Harris.
Well now it's getting the audio treatment and will be released this May. Treadaway will voice the role of the alien (known as Thomas Newton) who arrives in Kentucky with a very specific mission.
He has "five years to save the handful of survivors of his dying planet, and to save humanity from itself", according to the official synopsis.
It continues: "His plan is to use his race's advanced technology to make millions, and then build a spaceship to bring the last of his people to live on Earth."
"But Newton begins to doubt his purpose, and finds himself unable to cope with the emotional weight of being human. He finds solace with two fellow outsiders – cheery functioning alcoholic Betty-Jo, who falls quietly in love with him, and widowed scientist Nathan Bryce, who tracks him down after recognising his tech as impossible. Little do they realise that the Government are watching."
Eccleston will star as Nathan Bryce, while Laura Aikman – who has more recently starred in ITV's Archie – will star as Betty-Jo. The rest of the cast includes Stuart Milligan, Glen McCready, Ako Mitchell, André Refig, Fiona Sheehan and Alix Dunmore.
The new audio drama has been written by Stephen Keyworth, who is known for his work on Doctors, as well as EastEnders and Casualty.
The 1976 film retains its cult status today so it'll undoubtedly be an interesting listen for any fans of the movie or the original novel. The science fantasy drama was lauded for its surreal imagery, as well as being Bowie's first starring film role.
Bowie starred as Thomas Newton in the film, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg and adapted by Paul Mayersberg.
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-- The views expressed on this group are those of the member who made them & may not reflect those of the other members. "Admirers of Chris's Bits." --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Christopher Eccleston fan club." group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cefansite+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cefansite/DA4C9C81-BA01-4D14-ADF5-E8112CE5093B%40gmail.com.
The 1963 Walter Tevis novel went on to inspire the acclaimed 1976 movie which starred David Bowie. More recently, it was also the basis of Prime Video's 2022 seriesof the same name which starred Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy and Naomie Harris.
Well now it's getting the audio treatment and will be released this May. Treadaway will voice the role of the alien (known as Thomas Newton) who arrives in Kentucky with a very specific mission.
He has "five years to save the handful of survivors of his dying planet, and to save humanity from itself", according to the official synopsis.
It continues: "His plan is to use his race's advanced technology to make millions, and then build a spaceship to bring the last of his people to live on Earth."
"But Newton begins to doubt his purpose, and finds himself unable to cope with the emotional weight of being human. He finds solace with two fellow outsiders – cheery functioning alcoholic Betty-Jo, who falls quietly in love with him, and widowed scientist Nathan Bryce, who tracks him down after recognising his tech as impossible. Little do they realise that the Government are watching."
Eccleston will star as Nathan Bryce, while Laura Aikman – who has more recently starred in ITV's Archie – will star as Betty-Jo. The rest of the cast includes Stuart Milligan, Glen McCready, Ako Mitchell, André Refig, Fiona Sheehan and Alix Dunmore.
The new audio drama has been written by Stephen Keyworth, who is known for his work on Doctors, as well as EastEnders and Casualty.
The 1976 film retains its cult status today so it'll undoubtedly be an interesting listen for any fans of the movie or the original novel. The science fantasy drama was lauded for its surreal imagery, as well as being Bowie's first starring film role.
Bowie starred as Thomas Newton in the film, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg and adapted by Paul Mayersberg.
Sent from my iPad
-- The views expressed on this group are those of the member who made them & may not reflect those of the other members. "Admirers of Chris's Bits." --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Christopher Eccleston fan club." group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cefansite+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cefansite/DA4C9C81-BA01-4D14-ADF5-E8112CE5093B%40gmail.com.
The 1963 Walter Tevis novel went on to inspire the acclaimed 1976 movie which starred David Bowie. More recently, it was also the basis of Prime Video's 2022 seriesof the same name which starred Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy and Naomie Harris.
Well now it's getting the audio treatment and will be released this May. Treadaway will voice the role of the alien (known as Thomas Newton) who arrives in Kentucky with a very specific mission.
He has "five years to save the handful of survivors of his dying planet, and to save humanity from itself", according to the official synopsis.
It continues: "His plan is to use his race's advanced technology to make millions, and then build a spaceship to bring the last of his people to live on Earth."
"But Newton begins to doubt his purpose, and finds himself unable to cope with the emotional weight of being human. He finds solace with two fellow outsiders – cheery functioning alcoholic Betty-Jo, who falls quietly in love with him, and widowed scientist Nathan Bryce, who tracks him down after recognising his tech as impossible. Little do they realise that the Government are watching."
Eccleston will star as Nathan Bryce, while Laura Aikman – who has more recently starred in ITV's Archie – will star as Betty-Jo. The rest of the cast includes Stuart Milligan, Glen McCready, Ako Mitchell, André Refig, Fiona Sheehan and Alix Dunmore.
The new audio drama has been written by Stephen Keyworth, who is known for his work on Doctors, as well as EastEnders and Casualty.
The 1976 film retains its cult status today so it'll undoubtedly be an interesting listen for any fans of the movie or the original novel. The science fantasy drama was lauded for its surreal imagery, as well as being Bowie's first starring film role.
Bowie starred as Thomas Newton in the film, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg and adapted by Paul Mayersberg.
The Guilty Innocent is a gripping new series that explores some of the biggest miscarriages of justice in history. Each meticulously researched episode will see EMMY award-winning actor Christopher Eccleston lead an in-depth contemporary investigation into some of the world's most infamous cases of wrongful convictions. Using archive footage, talking head interviews with historical experts and reconstruction, each exciting close-ended episode will bring to life these fascinating stories and explore why and how the system got the wrong person and what it says about our world today.
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-- The views expressed on this group are those of the member who made them & may not reflect those of the other members. "Admirers of Chris's Bits." --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Christopher Eccleston fan club." group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cefansite+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cefansite/776D37B8-B1EC-4B54-AE4E-42A46FD4948D%40gmail.com.
The Guilty Innocent is a gripping new series that explores some of the biggest miscarriages of justice in history. Each meticulously researched episode will see EMMY award-winning actor Christopher Eccleston lead an in-depth contemporary investigation into some of the world's most infamous cases of wrongful convictions. Using archive footage, talking head interviews with historical experts and reconstruction, each exciting close-ended episode will bring to life these fascinating stories and explore why and how the system got the wrong person and what it says about our world today.
The Old Vic's new production of A Christmas Carol doesn't shy away from drawing parallels with the poverty of Dickens' time and today
CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON
24 Dec 2023
I first became aware of A Christmas Carol because of the BBC animation in the late 1960s or early '70s. I remember becoming fixated on it and obsessively drew the sequence when Scrooge returns to his office with the Scrooge and Marley sign. It was very, very atmospheric.
It's about duality, isn't it? Scrooge addresses that monster side of us all. And maybe as a kid, I was aware of that. Maybe the seeds of being an actor were sown then. It was about kindness or the absence of kindness and that chimed with me as a child, because as a kid I was always questioning my conscience and whether I was good or bad.
I watch every time there's a version of A Christmas Carol on film or television. This time last year, I wrote to the Old Vic directly and asked them why they had never thought of me for Scrooge. And now here we are.
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I think I bring energy and life experience to the role of Scrooge. As I've grown older and I've watched iterations of it, I've realised it is about a nervous breakdown. It is a condensed nervous breakdown that starts at approximately 7pm on Christmas Eve and ends at 7am on Christmas Day morning. So in the course of 12 hours, he goes through what I've been through in the last seven years – where I had the breakdown and I think I now feel fully recovered, if one ever can be.
Coincidentally, this is seven years after it happened to me, and Marley comes to Scrooge seven years after he dies. And this is the seventh production of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic. Not that I'm a numerologist, but there is a symmetry to it.
In the films, you have different actors playing old Scrooge and young Scrooge. But I get to play both. So it's a little bit Our Friends In The North, only you're switching, pivoting between the two within scenes. You're presenting the older man and the younger man – before the fall, after the fall, and then the return into innocence. So it's the role of a lifetime. And it's on at The Old Vic, where Charles Dickens witnessed theatre.
I do an RP accent, which has been exciting. I've had to age up and age down and I'm working with actors who are nearly all 25 or 30 years younger than me. They can not only act, they can sing and dance. And I can only act – and some people would question that – so it's really kicked my backside and kept me on my toes.
I've enjoyed leading the company. You have to do that onstage and offstage, and I like that – I was a kid that was captain of our football team, I like responsibility.
Christmas is very difficult for a lot of people. We know that domestic abuse and homelessness become all the more acute at Christmas. I'm divorced and decided last year, when I was missing my children over Christmas, that I need to be busy next time. So that's why I wanted to work over this period.
I also wanted to do this for my children. They've seen it. When I jumped off stage to wish the audience Merry Christmas, which is a part of the play, my children and my 91-year-old mum were sat right there, so I wished them all Merry Christmas as Scrooge, which was pretty meta. My daughter said, well, for once dad, I don't have any criticisms!
It's an odd experience. I'm not in any way a method actor, but you're acting redemption every single night. Scrooge becomes, to a certain extent, Father Christmas.
So you come off stage and your soul is adrenalised. I'm doing two shows today, so I'll be redeemed twice – and you've just got to be a bit careful with your ego and your energy levels and your euphoria. Oddly, it's easier to shake off Macbeth because you want to shake that off. With this, you really want to be the redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge – and 'honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year' – for the rest of your life. So it's easy to have your permanent redeemed Ebenezer goggles on and be this relentlessly positive arsehole, which is exhausting for other people.
Christopher Eccleston says he located his version of Scrooge among the current crop of Tory politicians. Image: Hugo Glendinning
I'm doing A Christmas Carol while the Covid inquiry is taking place. And I'm locating my Ebenezer Scrooge socially, culturally, and class-wise very much on that Conservative – well, you can't call it a government, more like a private members' club. That's what I'm playing. We talked a lot about current Conservative politicians in the characterisation, the way he sounds, his value system. It is so relevant. It could be any one of that cabinet. Scrooge is confronted with his conscience and acts on it. But they are without conscience and beyond redemption.
Dickens was famously inspired when he visited a poor house and that sowed the seeds for the story. It's a bit of propaganda. A sugary confection. But at its heart is a very angry condemnation of capitalism. I'm playing capitalism on stage every night on stage. And you cannot ignore that it is absolutely bang on for now, this argument that capitalism has gone as far as it can.
I don't know what the numbers were when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, but in this country there are now 12 million people living in poverty. I say that every night on stage – I make a speech at the end of the play and then we rattle a bucket and collect money for City Harvest. We have funded more than 290,000 meals already during this year's run.
It is beyond belief that, in a western democracy, these levels of poverty have to be addressed through charitable means rather than through governmental means. And it's a tiny drop in the ocean.
But I don't think an institution like The Old Vic could do a production like this and not address that issue. So we soften them up with the play then hit them with the bucket. We are making people happy and then we are asking people to cough up.
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Eccleston carries the Scrooge baton for the Old Vic's annual festive staging
It will probably come as no surprise when I say that Christopher Eccleston makes an excellent Scrooge. But it's not for the reason you might think. Yes, he captures the surliness and pain of Dickens' great miser with ease, but it's towards the latter stages when he's enraptured by the possibility of change that Eccleston really shines.
As he darts about the stage imploring us to help load up hampers of food to take to the Cratchitt residence, he exudes childish glee. When he exclaims he feels "light as a feather", you believe him; the glow on his face could roast a chestnut. It turns out that Eccleston, whose career has been built on hard characters with jagged edges (Doctor Who aside), is the very epitome of Christmas cheer.
Now in its seventh year, Matthew Warchus's production of A Christmas Carol has become a festive fixture. But for me, this marks my first look at it, and what impressed me most is the way Warchus and adaptor Jack Thorne have blown the dust off a story that has become canonised to the point of strangulation.
The stage is effectively a catwalk that dissects the Old Vic in two, with the audience seated all around. It's an arrangement that complements the stripped-back production. Rob Howell's set consists of a few door frames and boxes that are neatly housed in the stage itself and a collection of lanterns hangs overhead to really put us in a Dickensian mood.
The ghosts themselves, a chain-dragging Marley aside, are shorn of their usual fear factor, recast instead as softly-spoken women. They're not painted as spectres or ghouls, but as guides, gently nudging Scrooge towards the light as they tend to an antique doll's pram. Alongside poor clerk Bob Cratchit and his sickly son Tiny Tim, it's Scrooge's young love Belle who truly holds the key to his damascene conversion.
Eccleston, who really does feel born to play the central role, is ably supported by an ensemble that features several returning cast members. Rob Compton's kindly Bob and a rotating cast of talented young Tims ensure the Cratchit clan exudes goodness, while Frances McNamee's Belle shows the inner steel to tell some hard truths.
Scrooge's own family also get inflated roles in the story, with his alcoholic, grasping father (Andrew Langtree, neatly doubling as Marley) and beloved sister Fan (Rose Shalloo) adding backstory to his obsession with money. And Samuel Townsend's Fred does a good line in comic bemusement at his uncle's transformation.
To top it off, alongside the mince pies and oranges, composer/arranger Christopher Nightingale serves up a range of ethereal carols beautifully performed by the box-seated band and cast, who end proceedings with a breathtaking bell ringing "Silent Night". And amid the Cost of Living crisis, there's a welcome charity collection for City Harvest London on the way out, a reminder of the continuing relevance of Dickens' clarion call for compassion.
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-- The views expressed on this group are those of the member who made them & may not reflect those of the other members. "Admirers of Chris's Bits." --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Christopher Eccleston fan club." group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cefansite+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cefansite/B1B25AAC-5775-4A25-B383-7400D9723B10%40gmail.com.
Eccleston carries the Scrooge baton for the Old Vic's annual festive staging
It will probably come as no surprise when I say that Christopher Eccleston makes an excellent Scrooge. But it's not for the reason you might think. Yes, he captures the surliness and pain of Dickens' great miser with ease, but it's towards the latter stages when he's enraptured by the possibility of change that Eccleston really shines.
As he darts about the stage imploring us to help load up hampers of food to take to the Cratchitt residence, he exudes childish glee. When he exclaims he feels "light as a feather", you believe him; the glow on his face could roast a chestnut. It turns out that Eccleston, whose career has been built on hard characters with jagged edges (Doctor Who aside), is the very epitome of Christmas cheer.
Now in its seventh year, Matthew Warchus's production of A Christmas Carol has become a festive fixture. But for me, this marks my first look at it, and what impressed me most is the way Warchus and adaptor Jack Thorne have blown the dust off a story that has become canonised to the point of strangulation.
The stage is effectively a catwalk that dissects the Old Vic in two, with the audience seated all around. It's an arrangement that complements the stripped-back production. Rob Howell's set consists of a few door frames and boxes that are neatly housed in the stage itself and a collection of lanterns hangs overhead to really put us in a Dickensian mood.
The ghosts themselves, a chain-dragging Marley aside, are shorn of their usual fear factor, recast instead as softly-spoken women. They're not painted as spectres or ghouls, but as guides, gently nudging Scrooge towards the light as they tend to an antique doll's pram. Alongside poor clerk Bob Cratchit and his sickly son Tiny Tim, it's Scrooge's young love Belle who truly holds the key to his damascene conversion.
Eccleston, who really does feel born to play the central role, is ably supported by an ensemble that features several returning cast members. Rob Compton's kindly Bob and a rotating cast of talented young Tims ensure the Cratchit clan exudes goodness, while Frances McNamee's Belle shows the inner steel to tell some hard truths.
Scrooge's own family also get inflated roles in the story, with his alcoholic, grasping father (Andrew Langtree, neatly doubling as Marley) and beloved sister Fan (Rose Shalloo) adding backstory to his obsession with money. And Samuel Townsend's Fred does a good line in comic bemusement at his uncle's transformation.
To top it off, alongside the mince pies and oranges, composer/arranger Christopher Nightingale serves up a range of ethereal carols beautifully performed by the box-seated band and cast, who end proceedings with a breathtaking bell ringing "Silent Night". And amid the Cost of Living crisis, there's a welcome charity collection for City Harvest London on the way out, a reminder of the continuing relevance of Dickens' clarion call for compassion.
Christopher Eccleston and Andrew Langtree in A Christmas Carol, © Manuel Harlan