A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story at Birmingham Rep

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Thu 14 Nov 2024 - Sun 05 Jan 2025

For a man playing the iconic role of Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story at Birmingham Rep this festive season, Rufus Hound is pretty definite on whether there can really be such things as phantom visitors.

He says: “I don’t believe in ghosts, they don’t exist. Ask me why and I’ll tell you - Brian Cox put me right on this.”

Rufus is talking about the scientist Brian Cox who he sometimes appears alongside with Robin Ince on the BBC Radio Four show The Infinite Monkey Cage. “Brian was explaining to me how everything in the universe might be a hologram,” Rufus continues. “And then, as he was in the middle of that, someone on the other side of the room mentioned ghosts and Robin Ince said ‘don’t say ghosts around Brian’ and Brian just looked at them and said ‘it breaks the first rule of thermodynamics’. "

And he continues: “So if you want a computer that works or a plane that flies you’re putting your faith in science and at the point where that same science says there’s no such thing as ghosts I’m sorry but there isn’t.”



Rufus may not believe in ghosts but he certainly understands the popularity of Charles Dickens’ tale of the miser Scrooge who is frightened into changing his ways by a series of phantoms from his past, present and future.

And, he says, this production, adapted by Mark Gatiss and premiered at Nottingham Playhouse before transferring to London’s Alexandra Palace and now revived in Birmingham is very much about spectres rather than tinsel and baubles. “When Charles Dickens first wrote this story, it was very much a ghost story that was set at Christmas, not, as we tend to think of it, a Christmas story that’s got a few ghosts in,” Rufus explains. “To that end, we are a very faithful retelling and I think we really do an amazing job of capturing the spirit, if you’ll forgive the pun, of the original novel.”

It may be a familiar story but the show re-tells it afresh, says Rufus. “This is very high-quality Christmas theatre and in that way that theatre does, it can take your breath away with how powerful and meaningful this is. It’s an old story and we are very familiar with it but Mark has absolutely gone out of his way to prick our modern sensibilities with some of the tones that are already in Dickens’ story. There are no end of people who like their stories a little creepy, a little spooky and for those people we present this show.”

Dickens’ Christmas Carol message about the necessity of generosity remains as relevant today as when he first published the story in 1843. “I think we live in a world where we largely think that most people are acting in their own self- interest all the time and to hell with everyone else,” Rufus says. “Dickens wrote this in the middle of the hungry forties where basically if you were poor you were largely a criminal so in these straitened times of the Cost of Living Crisis where nobody can afford anything and prices rise seven times and nothing pays as much as it used to, we can all relate to it.”

And the show features characters whose traits remain recognizable today. “Dickens was also aware there were those people who were doing rather well out of life who could maybe do with taking a moment or two and considering the stain it was leaving on their Christian soul. There is not one of us who reads about the profits of these super-rich guys and doesn’t think ‘My God, that person could give me a million quid and they would never miss it. It’s like pocket change to them and yet the difference that million quid would make to my life.’ All of us who have grown up with the kinds of wealth disparity that we are all so jarringly aware of, I think we all watch it in the belief that one of them might wake up one morning and think ‘Oh no, my selfish heart has left me in the kind of existential trouble that it takes ghosts and spirits to put right.’ It’s a good fantasy to have.”

And while we may not see ourselves as miserly as Scrooge, Rufus believes the story also pricks our own consciences just a little. “I think we have all at one time or another been asked to be more generous than we feel able and then maybe after the event have thought actually that generosity would have cost me very little in the grand scheme of things.”

Rufus began his entertainment career as a stand-up comedian playing gigs across the UK. In October 2021 he featured in the Birmingham-made television soap series Doctors and has since built up an impressive stage presence including productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company including Don Quixote, The Boy in the Dress and The Provoked Wife. And he says performing at Birmingham Rep is realizing an ambition. “In my stand-up career I did loads of gigs in Birmingham, in Kings Heath and places like that. I love Birmingham to pieces, it’s one of my favourite places to be, I love the Midlands.”



A Christmas Carol is the first time Rufus has taken to the stage at Birmingham Rep. “Because my background was stand-up I didn’t come through drama school so there are certain institutions that one wants to have tapped the door of in order to stake one’s claim of being a legitimate theatre actor. So I spent a couple of years at the RSC, I’ve worked at the Palladium, I’ve got to work at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, I need to work at the Bristol Old Vic and Pitlochry Festival Theatre - there are some of these that are on the list. And no small part of wanting to do this play was specifically because it was at The Rep.”

Rufus is spending nearly three months in Birmingham for the show and is hoping to have time to discover the city during the festive period. “I’ve always been very won over by the magic of Christmas. Whether it is the big Jesus in the stable or whether you see it as a pagan festival of light and dark, there is something innate in every human being that, when the days are at their shortest and coldest, when the darkness looms largest, that is the point to get everyone together under one roof and to eat fully and be generous and to be with your loved ones all together in the warm and the light, staving off the shortest day, the cold.”

As a father-of-two, he also knows how much work Christmas can involve. “My children are teenagers now so my ideal Christmas is more and more centred on the food and a lot of games get played,” he says. “I’m normally pretty good when it’s Charades. And I try not to lose my temper as I try to explain the rules of those games to people who are way more interested in eating Quality Street!”

A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story, Birmingham Rep, 14 Nov - 5 Jan, Tickets here.
Age Guidance 12+ Relaxed perf: Sunday 1 Dec 2.30pm; Fri 6 Dec 7pm

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