‘I’ve played a lot of sarcastic bastards’: Roger Allam on bad singing, big paydays and Elgar’s level of ‘speed’ | film

A The main plot point of The Choral revolves around Roger Allam singing poorly. This is the man who originated the role of Javert in Les Misérables in 1985, who was nominated for an Olivier Award for his performance in the Cy Coleman musical City of Angels and who once considered a career as an opera singer.

Talk to me about it, I say: bad singing. We are at his home in southwest London. He’s very busy filming, but there was only a small window of time to meet up – would I mind coming over to his house? No, of course I didn’t, and here I was on a windy Monday morning, sitting in a chair next to him, sitting in the corner on the sofa in a cozy but anonymous front room overlooking a leafy street.

“Well, I’m a little relieved,” he says with a laugh. “The part in Gerontius” – which his character is trying to sing – “is the tenor solo, and it’s endless and very difficult and very high. And I – as you can hear – I have a baritone voice, a very low voice too. And I haven’t sung for about 15 years. So I was rather happy because it must be bad!”

Written by Alan Bennett, directed by Nicholas Hytner, the film takes place in 1916 in a Yorkshire factory town on the cusp of massive societal change, hollowed out by grief when its young men die in foreign fields. The choral community is at the heart of this community, but even there it is far from business as usual: Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion is banned (German music). There’s a new choir master. The need for new singers is so urgent, they may have to look beyond the ranks of the respectable middle classes. Allam plays a kindly local mill owner, who funds the “choir” and thus finds a way to soothe his grief.

It is full of glorious period detail, subtle wit and wisdom, and Elgar’s “Dream of Gerontius” speech plays a major role. Allam’s previous experience with the piece had not been positive. “Shortly before we started filming, there was a show in London that I went to and I’m afraid to say I found it rather boring,” he admits. “But singing was very exciting.”

For the most part, it’s the actors themselves whose voices we hear. “I found the chorus sections very moving: the effort that goes into singing together and trying to make it good. My father was a priest, so I was in his choir, and one at school, and the idea of ​​doing classical singing at university came to me. Music and singing have always been part of my life.”

One of the film’s most fascinating turns is the appearance of Simon Russell Beale as the unusually ostentatious Elgar, who, upon realizing that this amateur choral society has rearranged and reimagined his work, retracts his permission to perform. Does Allam know if there is any truth in Bennett’s text? Could a composer really be, quite frankly, such a gateway?

“I don’t know!” He says. “I think perhaps Elgar was a little angry that he had not been as respected as he thought he perhaps should have been. The first performance of Gerontius was very poor. I think it is understandable if he retracts it. But as to his ‘anger’ – I am not qualified to say.”

We turn to a character whose audacity is unmistakable: Javert, the villain of Les Misérables, now back in the public eye as the musical celebrates its 40th birthday. Allam says he was asked to participate in the celebrations, but he was not free. Did he, a young RSC actor in his early 30s, have a sense of the phenomenon the show would be?

“No! The reviews were very mixed although there were some people who really loved the place from the start. When we opened at the Barbican, it seemed very long. When we moved to the West End, some parts were taken out. And straight away it was full all the time.” To what does he attribute its great success? “It’s a feel-good kind of music, in the sense that it makes people feel like they’re good people; it’s morally good because it’s sympathetic to the characters. It works in the same way that a great, amazing melodrama does: it excites you.”

Likewise, in Game of Thrones, Allam sported a magnificent beard with Viking-style braids. “I’m barely in it!” He protests. “I was just filming Falstaff at the Globe” – for which he won an Olivier Award – “so I was completely broke. There were only two episodes. But it swelled the bank balance enough to get me through the year.”

He hadn’t watched a single second of the show until the pandemic, when he and his youngest son decided to sit down to watch the entire show. “And some of it is absolutely fantastic! There’s one battle scene that’s so great, it makes you realize how terrifying we can be. And some of it is just bullshit!”

Allam, as you might expect, is not particularly well filtered. A bit like one of his most famous creations, The Thick by Peter Mannion: a suave but beleaguered Conservative MP, etc. from a thousand memes. “They were very glorious scripts,” he says with a smile of the series, which marks its 20th anniversary this year. “It was the beginning of that time – which still continues – when politics seemed to be limited to making announcements. As long as you could make announcements and get a little attention…”

What does he think Mannion will do now? “Oh, some shady business somewhere. He’s climbing into his own nest as best he can. But I don’t think he’ll join the Reformation.”

This is a show made famous by young people – although for those younger, it’s the charming CBeebies cartoon Sarah and Duck, for which it provides a friendly voice-over. “On the train into the city, sometimes parents would come up to me and say thank you, because it was the only thing that put their baby to sleep, or they would ask me if I would mind saying ‘Merry Christmas, Chloe’ in my Sarah and Duck voices.”

Would he mind? “No, of course not! It’s nice. It’s not like I’m being chased down the street by rabid mothers with strollers.”

Another voice role that makes him hugely emotional is Radio 4’s Cabin Pressure, written by comedic genius John Fenimore. “It was a pleasure to do,” he says. Does he have a favorite episode? It reflects. “I love otters.” He means Ottery St Mary, where his character, Douglas, explains, among other things, the origins of the Devon town’s name, and he, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Martin and Fenimore’s Arthur ponder how many hypothetical otters could fit into a small plane.

Many of Allam’s roles are based on his appeal as a vulnerable middle-class sex symbol, quick-witted but big-hearted. Maybe that sound coming into bed is the clincher: deep, rich and smooth. In 2010’s Tamara Drewe, he was a crime detective novelist who was in love with Gemma Arterton – he ended up being trampled to death by cows, and in the French farce Boing-Boing, he reconciled three estranged suitors. Continuing Talks from a Long Marriage on Radio 4 sees him as Joanna Lumley’s grumpy but loving husband as the two discuss friends’ divorces, descaling boilers and whether it’s reasonable to expect dancing and Having sex on the same night.

However, despite this distinctive personality, Allam says he is not quite as comfortable as himself. “I would feel uncomfortable going on TV and just being me. I don’t like it at all.” Those who book Celebrity Traitors or Bake Off should try somewhere else; He says that even group shows are not his bag, despite his obvious talent for comedy and great speech delivery. “No, I hate it. I wouldn’t be any good.”

It is also interesting that he feels a greater kinship not with those roles which one might assume closely mirror the real-life man, but with de Fred Thursday in the Inspector Morse prequel Endeavor. “Having played a lot of cynical middle-class scoundrels, I was immediately drawn to the character because this was more of my actual family background – working class. One grandfather was a worker on a building site, the other was a bricklayer,” he says.

“Thursday is definitely someone from my father’s generation. My mother was born in 1912, my father in 1914, and his brother Fred was born in 1916. Playing with him was an opportunity to explore and remember the 1960s and the lives of people like my family.”

The choir also taps into this interest in the past lives of ordinary people who come together to make beauty amidst difficulties. “Singing in a choir is a way to bring communities together. Art, music, drama – these are the things we do best. And we’re not killing each other by the millions over it.”

It stops. “It got me thinking that maybe I should join a choir or get some lessons and see where my voice is… if it’s still there in some form.”