MARK GATISS WISHES YOU A SCARY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

WITH NO LESS THAN THREE SPECTR AL TREATS, INCLUDING A NEW VERSION OF THE AMAZING MR BLUNDEN

WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD

AMARK GATISS

PORTRAIT: BERTIE WATSON

ALL OF MARK GATISS’S Christmases have come at once. “It’s a three-pronged attack from me this year,” he beams, as he prepares to unleash a spooky trinity of new projects. “I feel like Santa must do when he’s making his toys in the middle of July. It’s been Christmas for me all year round!”

And a deeply Gatiss brand of Christmas too. The Christmas of pale midwinter light and dark, fast-encroaching evenings. An ideal season for fireside tales of hauntings. Pull up a chair, ignore the bony, grave-cold hand rummaging in the Quality Street…

It’s a bright, apparition-free morning as SFX catches up with Gatiss over Zoom – so bright that he needs to shift position, adjusting the angle on his iPhone. “I can’t sleep in this flat,” he frets. “I need black-out curtains. Blinds are hopeless. I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s like daylight. I have to wear an eyemask, like Joan Collins!”

He needs his kip. Tonight’s the press night for A Christmas Carol, a new stage version of Charles Dickens’s phantasmic morality tale.

It’s been adapted by Gatiss, who also plays chain-bound wraith Jacob Marley. Arriving at London’s Alexandra Palace Theatre for a Christmas run, it’s a take that relishes the scarier side of Dickens.

“It’s a joyous production but I was very keen to examine it as the progenitor of the English ghost story. Dickens drew together so many strands. Marley is like a revenant, literally clanking chains like something from a haunted castle. And then you have the mystery of Christmas Past, old and young at the same time. Christmas Present is like this great big Falstaffian celebration of life. And then Christmas Yet To Come is terrifying, because we don’t know what the future is.

Simon Callow is (the new) TheAmazing Mr Blunden.

“There’s a lot of Christmas Carols out there and I wanted to find a distinctive take on it, so it’s subtitled A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story for that reason. It is very spooky. If I was six I wouldn’t be allowed to go, but if I was eight it would give me everything I wanted. We’ve got some properly scary bits, which I’m thrilled about, obviously!”