Murnaghan Interview with Rufus Hound, actor and comedian, 20.09.15

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, scheming revolts, the battle for power, we’ve just been discussing it really haven’t we?  Well not the latest goings on in Westminster but the centuries old plot of Shakespeare’s history plays.  A new production has brought four, no less, of them together for the first time in more than fifty years under the guiding hand of Sir Trevor Nunn.  Well one of those starring in The Wars of the Roses is the actor and comedian Rufus Hound.  He is with me now, very good to see you Rufus.  I know you were listening in to that interview and I’d be interested to get your take on it first, if you can draw some parallels with these plays.  Are you excited by the election of Jeremy Corbyn?  Have you rejoined the party because you stood as an independent didn’t you?

RUFUS HOUND: Well not quite, I stood at the European Elections for the National Health Action Party which is a party created by doctors to try and defend the NHS from what’s being done to it.  I had never been a member of the Labour party so it wasn’t re-joining, it was joining for the first time.  

DM: But you have?  

RUFUS HOUND: My wife and I joined the Labour party within 45 minutes of Jeremy Corbyn’s win being announced, yes.  

DM: And do you think, given what we were discussing there with Marina there and this issue of principles versus pragmatism to get elected, do you want to say stick to what you said, Jeremy, that’s why we voted for you?

RUFUS HOUND: What’s interesting to me and certainly within the powerhouse that is Sky News it feels quite interesting, that the rhetoric, Limmy will hate me for saying this but the narrative that springs out, it feels to me that the last ten years at least the media really bangs the drum on when it wants the story, how it wants to be briefed to receive that story and politicians have responded to make … I used to work in PR so what you do is that you write the story up and it is literally, just publish that and I think that journalists, all production has suffered from under-funding so as easy as you can make the story, that’s great because we’ve got to move on because we’ve got another 50,000 stories to do.  

DM: And we have to otherwise we won’t be talking about the plays.  

RUFUS HOUND: But that narrative is quite interesting to me and what Corbyn represents, when he talks about Labour he talks about the Labour movement, when he talks about what he wants to do he talks about us doing it, it’s we, it’s inclusive and what undoubtedly has happened, certainly during this age of austerity, is through social media, through living in the information age, we know that the rich got richer and that the people who are suffering most from austerity are the people at the very bottom.  

DM: He didn’t cause crisis but your plays …

RUFUS HOUND: We’ll talk about our plays.   

DM: We won’t have time.   

RUFUS HOUND: Oh we’ve got time, you’re a 24 hour news station, it’s a Sunday, there’s nothing happening!  It’s not fair just as basic human decency that the people carrying the can are not the people that made the problem.  There is enough to go round and what did Corbyn say?  Things can and will change, poverty isn’t … we don’t have to have unfairness, we haven’t got to do all of those things.  
DM: When we had a discussion about this interview, Rufus, in our production meeting we said we don’t know whether he’ll want to talk about Corbyn or not!  But talk about The Wars of the Roses, I said you’d got four plays but you’ve compressed two of them so there is Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 and Richard III.  You’ve got three different parts?   

RUFUS HOUND: Well yes, it was originally performed in the 60s, Peter Hall and John Barton embarked on taking Henry VI the three parts of that and just tightening them up and putting the onus a lot more on the politics.  Because they are history plays there is quite a lot of ‘News from France, what news from France?’ so it’s about really cutting it down to delivering that story and it feels quite pressing at the moment as people talking about binge watching and they talk about Game of Thrones or House of Cards or whatever and they’ll sit and watch big chunks of that.

DM: So this is a theatre box set.  

RUFUS HOUND: It is a theatre box set and a lot of people are very familiar with Richard III but much less so with the Henry plays.  When you see what went before in the lead up to Richard III it really paints Richard III as quite a different thing, he’s not just the monstrous face of evil, he is the product of an expectation of owning power, of divine right to rule and lead and it is an interesting study on those who believe power must be there.  

DM: I told you we’d run out of time, Rufus, where’s it on, when do you start, have you started?  

RUFUS HOUND: It’s on at the Kingston Theatre which is the first place those plays were performed when Shakespeare wrote them so we bring the plays home.  It is a phenomenal thing to be a part of, the performances are amazing, my fellow cast mates are all wonderful, Joely Richardson, Robbie Sheehan, everyone involved and you’d be a fool to miss it.

DM: You would be.  Rufus Hound thank you very much indeed and Sir Trevor Nunn directing of course.