Simon Callow is launching his latest UK tour from The Customs House in South Shields tomorrow. The actor, writer and director talks to BARBARA HODGSON about his latest Charles Dickens project, the author’s everyman appeal ... and the Geordie accent

TO many people, Simon Callow is the voice of Dickens. In his one-man stage shows the ebullient actor brings to life the stories, sweeping from Victorian sentimentality to galloping high drama, of Britain’s best-loved author.

His fruity voice lends itself to such colourful characters as Mr Micawber, Bill Sykes and Scrooge and he’s played their creator too, most recently in the season finale of Doctor Who.

Callow – who made his name in 1994 film hit Four Weddings and a Funeral as the party-loving, kilt-wearing (and doomed) Gareth – could not be more enthusiastic about the great man whom he revisits anew tomorrow night when he’ll be reading extracts from his new biography, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, and taking part in a question- and-answer session.

He’s already written copiously about his subject and is something of an expert so when I suggest we can’t really know what Dickens sounded like, he says delightedly: “We’ve a very good idea!”

And, apparently, the voice was nothing like his.

“He had quite a light voice which he was frequently on the brink of losing.”

He tells me that detailed records were made during Dickens’s live appearances.

Beside those famous readings which we know brought him to Newcastle, including to the Lit & Phil, Dickens – a great lover of theatre – was certainly not shy when it came to performing his characters on stage and the musicality of his speech patterns was noted: “How it went up very high and suddenly dropped down again, was read faster then slowly,” says Callow.

Dickens performed all over the place and was hugely popular in the US. Kate Field, an American journalist of the time, covered his lectures and noted the way he spoke. The result is “the closest we can ever come to a live recording.”

And, adds Callow, now in full flow, “he was a glorious mimic”, impersonating all the different boroughs around the capital as well as regional accents as he travelled the country.

He’s sure that Dickens would have given Geordie a go on his visits to us. A showman and modern celebrity, it seems he wouldn’t have been able to help himself. “He was always spot-on with the accents.”

For his part, Callow, 62, never had any intention of trying to impersonate the author.

“I have such a very different voice, it would be madness.

“Anyway, that’s not the point.”

What’s important to him is keeping the tales as fresh, vivid and powerful as if they had been written yesterday.

It’s all about capturing their passion. And he’s certainly the man to do it.