We sat down for an exclusive interview with Neal Foster who directs and stars in Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain – The Best Bits! – Birmingham Stage Company’s non-stop romp through Britain’s remarkable history! It runs at Apollo Theatre from 31st July to 31st August.
Congratulations on 20 years of Horrible Histories Live on Stage! When you first brought it to the stage, did you imagine it would become such a long-running success?
Whenever you choose a play to produce or a book to adapt, you never know how successful it’s going to be on stage. We never anticipated Horrible Histories would go from strength to strength over twenty years after opening in Darlington, even though the response we received to that very first performance was unlike anything we’d experienced before. Our major tours use incredible 3D effects which feature in the second half, and I remember saying to my team “If they’re excited as this at the interval, wait until they see the 3D!”.
You’ve brought history to life for many audiences over the year – was history something you loved as a child, or did that passion grow through theatre?
I became really interested in history because of two great teachers at my secondary school. They would simply stand at the front of the class and tell stories – endlessly fascinating stories about Europe. Conversely, my teacher of English history was extraordinarily boring and it’s deeply ironic that I now make my living bringing English history to life, after I discovered wasn’t boring at all! It only goes to show how important teachers are in our lives.
How did you choose which historical characters and moments made it into The Best Bits!?
We’ve performed five different productions of Barmy Britain in the West End and it’s always been tremendous fun. But there have been about ten sketches from those five shows that audiences have loved the most and we’ve decided to bring these scenes together in one big brilliant show. My favourite may be about Guy Fawkes who enters the game show Who Wants to Blow Up Parliament? But I also love playing the infamous body snatchers Burke and Hare, who didn’t in fact snatch bodies from graveyards – they murdered the poor people who were staying in their lodging house!
What are some of the biggest challenges in bringing such chaotic and comic history to life on stage?
The joy and difficulty of HH is crunching a complicated and sometimes very long episode in history into an hilarious three-minute sketch, but that’s why the show is so effective. John Cleese once said that if you can make someone laugh, then you’re being understood, because people don’t laugh at things they don’t understand, and when they laugh, they remember it. Thankfully Britain keeps producing people like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, so we’re never going to run out of stories for Barmy Britain!
How has the production evolved over the years in terms of style, audience expectations, or storytelling?
Perhaps the biggest change is when we were asked to bring our productions into the West End, because we had to reduce the scale of them to fit under the evening production. So we created a show with just two performers, which brought us into the great tradition of comics who work as a double act. We’ve found the audience love seeing two actors turning into so many different characters in the course of one show, and it also creates a wonderful relationship on stage between the actors and the audience.
If you could bring any historical figure to see Barmy Britain – The Best Bits!, who would it be – and how do you think they’d react?
The Romans were far ahead of anywhere else in the Western world and so I think it would be fun to show a Roman how things have changed since they ruled Britannia. I wonder if they’d be surprised or just say “Is that all you’ve managed to achieve in 1,600 years?”.