y initial response to being offered a job at the Royal Shakespeare Company was one of fear. The fear that I might not be worthy. Here was this lauded institution, and there was me – a little farty. A little farty from light entertainment. The odd thing is it’s where I’d always wanted to go. Had you asked me at the age of 18 where I wanted to go with my “acting”, I would have happily told you that I was heading for the RSC. At school, we did a Shakespeare production every year. I did them all. From playing an unnamed courtier in The Taming of the Shrew – I remember very vividly being accidentally dragged across the stage by two Alsatians dressed as hunting dogs, and snagging my tights on a nail – to playing Hamlet in my final year. In fact, Hamlet saved me from being expelled. I’d been caught doing the usual thing, drinking and smoking, and I believe this time the crime was compounded by “throwing up in the prefects’ wastepaper bin”. We were halfway through rehearsals, so my English teacher pleaded on my behalf (well, his behalf, too) and persuaded the headmaster to let me stay. Naturally I was a triumph – darling! I went on to study drama at Manchester University, still pretty sure that the RSC was where I was destined to be. Then came the thorny problem of equity cards and the closed-shop union. No job without a card, no card without a job. There was a rumour that doing “lunchtime theatre” at a pub called The Band on the Wall might provide something called variety contracts, which somehow provided a back door into Equity. Rik Mayall and a couple of chums and I decided we’d give this a go. But what to perform? We had no time to learn a new play every week. We’d improvise! Easy. And ... well some of you can probably see where this is going – a different career happened. All thoughts of the RSC receded into the distance. Jump forward 40 years and out of the blue the director Chris Luscombe asks if I’d like to play Malvolio in Twelfth Night. You’d have to ask him why. We did a post-show Q&A together once, and he mentioned wanting someone with “funny bones”. Because the odd thing is that Malvolio isn’t a particularly humorous part. He doesn’t have many actual jokes. The joke, as it were, is on him. People laugh at him. He is basically the victim of a cruel practical joke. So you need someone with funny bones to be sympathetic to all the funny stuff going on around him. It’s like being a conductor for laughs. Which is why he is quite often portrayed by people with a comic sensibility – Nigel Hawthorne, Richard Briers, Richard Wilson, Stephen Fry. I was eager to accept, but held back long enough to consider what I could possibly do that other people hadn’t. What was the point in just copying? For 40 years I’d basically been creating my own stuff, or doing new stuff written by someone else – why bother repeating what so many had already done? So I read the text over and over. Malvolio’s involvement is actually quite short – even though he’s considered the main part, it’s really more of an ensemble piece, so it didn’t take long! He’s really only on stage for less than half an hour. I looked at the performances mentioned above, and watched Alec Guinness’s stab at it. And I met with Chris to talk it through. And the line I took was that no one seemed to have played that they were really in love with Olivia. A deep, life-long, unrequited, pure love, that he would be happy to leave unrequited but for this sudden opportunity provoked by the faked letter in her handwriting. There’s a line in the letter: “Remember who commended thy yellow stockings, and wished to see thee ever cross-gartered.” Which can only mean that Malvolio had worn the yellow stockings before, perhaps when she was a child, in order to amuse her. He’s been with the household for years. Chris was also keen to get musical numbers into the show, one of them being Please One and So Please All – from a line of Malvolio’s in which he quotes a popular song of the time. Chris unearthed the full lyrics, Nigel Hess set them to music, and we have Malvolio singing it to himself when he is at his happiest and most hopeful – a happy memory of the joyful man he might have been, the previous wearer of yellow stockings. We’re all on the spectrum that ranges from dour and depressing to ridiculous and joyous. And we don’t stick to the same notch on the scale the whole time. Who knows why so many people seem to willingly become so unlovable? Malvolio’s a sharp-tongued, po-faced joykiller, but he can’t have started out that way. He runs the household with meticulous precision. And while he’s unpleasant, he never does enough to provoke the wicked prank the rest of the household pulls on him, to be left imprisoned and losing his marbles. Thankfully we no longer find someone being bullied as hysterical as people used to. I decided that if I could get the audience to laugh at him being bullied and then feel very guilty about it in the last scene, then I would have won ... comedy and pathos are brilliant bedfellows. Discuss. Twelfth Night will premiere on Marquee TV on 11 April, with a watchalong on Twitter starting at 7.15pm.