Richard O’Brien, of Rocky Horror and Crystal Maze fame, plays the central character in Paul Birch’s The Barren Author, out now from Spiteful Puppet. In this playful reinvention of the tales of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe, O’Brien plays The Brigadier, who is telling the tale in sessions via video calls to the mysterious Smith, played by Doctor Who actor and writer Sophie Aldred. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, O’Brien chatted to Paul Simpson (and producer Barnaby Eaton-Jones) from a secret location somewhere in New Zealand…

How did you get caught up in this wonderful reinvention of Baron Munchausen?

Well, it was an oddity because Barnaby approached my agent, asked if I would become involved and then followed it up with ‘There’s absolutely no money whatsoever’ and I applauded his audacity. I liked the way he approached it, and let’s face it, even as a child when we first come into touch with Munchausen we have to be delighted don’t we?

He’s just one of those characters that inspires the childishness in everybody. The truth is whatever he wants it to be and the more outlandish his tales are, the more extreme they are, the more wonderful they are.

I loved Terry Gilliam’s movie, I thought that was absolutely splendid – then again anything that Gilliam does seems to be wonderful.

I just got intrigued and we went with it and did the first one. My darling wife and [the sound engineer] Nigel were here while I was recording it and they were giggling. At the end of it, I had no idea whether there was any merit in it whatsoever.

The next time, they were giggling and once again I still had no idea whether there was any mileage in it or not. So I was going on blindly. I was enjoying doing it but is this story coming together? Is it going to engage other people? My litmus test was these two people that were here

It’s been like that ever since, until this very day. I’m about to do the last episode and I’m still bemused by the entire project. Sorry Barnaby. (Laughs)

So, it’s not actually Munchausen is it? It’s a reinvention in that sense. When you read them were there things that you thought ‘Ahh, now I could just tweak it a little this way and bring a bit of what I love into it?’

I don’t think that Barnaby intended that the narrator should be doing the other voices. I should just be in my own voice telling the people what he or she said to me, but being one of those people that likes to do voices it became an opportunity to have a go. So I’d sit and decide which one I was going to do, in the privacy of my own home and then come in and try it out. John Hurt gets a walk out… ‘I don’t know why I just had that voice down there’.

I enjoy playing around with voices, always have. I was one of those children that used to provide a soundtrack to playing in the garden at all times, leaping up and playing different characters, engaging myself with various other people. I think that’s why I became an actor in the first place, I loved living in a world of make believe and this falls into that category.

Munchausen pretty much is the archetype of “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.

Absolutely, he is. I’ve lived with people who can’t help but lie, I really have. I’ve spent quite a lot of time, I won’t mention any names but some people are born to lie and they can’t help it. It’s a kind of illness in some ways and it’s very difficult.

We have the president of the United States right now who is incapable of discerning the difference between the truth and reality, and he encourages us and others so that they don’t have their feet on the ground anymore. It’s the scariest time in our lifetime.

I don’t know if we get any of that in Munchausen but it is a world we’re now living in. I was reading that a journalist for Time Magazine was going through America recently and Philadelphia is one of the states along with a few others that are on the teeter. Nobody wanted to talk about the realities, the economy or Covid but they were quite prepared to spend a lot of time talking about QAnon conspiracy theories as if they were reality. This is just the world we’re living in, it’s dispiriting.

Do you think it is that people like Munchausen are frightened of reality and if he faces reality he’s going to be screwed himself?

There is an argument, isn’t there, that people who fear the reality then step up their own agendas. When we all marched against the war in Iraq, millions of us in London then Tony Blair went into the House of Commons and said we were all foolishly misguided… He didn’t quite say we were misguided fools but it seems the same thing, bit more patronising. That war went on and we could see that democracy was an idea. They build up the fear factor so they can bring their own agendas to the table.

When you’re playing a character like this, do you put yourself to the side and totally inhabit the character when you’re playing him? Or do you put it through the filter of Richard as you’re performing it?

I’m not sure how it happens, truthfully,  I think if I did, I don’t think I’d be very good at it. I know it’s a craft – acting is a craft – but mostly that’s stagecraft and not radio

I was just saying to Barnaby, I’m doing the last one in a moment and I was doing it in the kitchen last night and suddenly something ‘other’ happened. I hear a different voice coming out of my head, as if I’m standing to one side of it and listening to someone else doing it. I’m not quite sure how it works and I’m not sure whether I should investigate it too deeply.

Probably not.

It might go away.

This project must have appealed to something in you – so what actually attracts you to carry on picking up a script and doing it? What’s it got to have?

Well, one thing that is terribly engaging is the fact that it is radio and I’ve got the script there. I don’t have to learn it and abandon it and walk around remembering it. (Laughs)

And nobody’s looking over your shoulder, that’s another thing.

I’m a doodler, I’m not an artist but I’m a doodler and if I’m doodling and I just let myself go I doodle rather well. My draftsmanship, my sense of colour and shape and form is quite good if I just abandon myself to it. The minute I start to think about it or the minute somebody else is looking over my shoulder, I’m f***ed. I don’t know what that is and it’s the same with acting I think.

It’s a bit of that left brain/right brain thing isn’t it? If you let things go by instinct then it comes out in a certain way but the minute you start analysing it then you’re putting a whole lot of different filters on it and it becomes why am I doing this?

Yes, I don’t know if ego gets in the way or what it is. I suppose it’s a difference of somebody who is naturally humorous and people are – Willy Rushton was just naturally funny – and there are people who want to be funny and they have to burn the midnight oil to do so and it kind of gets in the way doesn’t it?

Yes. And it also means there’s something in the way between the script and you that almost stops you from doing it.

Yes. Well, you have to let go is the answer, you’re quite right. It’s just to let go.

So, what’s been the particular challenges on working on this apart from having weird interviews at odd times of the morning?

Barnaby sends me the script and then occasionally I’ve taken issue with some of the ways it’s been going, maybe a joke might have appeared to be sneering or belittling. We’re looking for the joke and the joke fails, misses its mark and it becomes unkind maybe, rather than acerbic or funny.

We have to be very careful that our humour doesn’t belittle other people because that’s the way humour seems to have gone lately. The jokes, well once again Trump’s jokes are belittlement of other people. He sees it all as humour but it’s deeply unpleasant.

You want to be laughing with people not laughing at them.

Exactly so.

And you’re working with Sophie Aldred on this.

We haven’t actually worked together. What I do this end is imagine her speaking to me and react to the imagined line. She has to pop the lines in as if we have a two way thing going but we haven’t actually. It’s what we do on animated movies all the time.

Barnaby Eaton-Jones: I just have to say, leap in briefly, Richard’s voices that he’s done are just astonishing in the sense that coming from an acting point of view, sometimes you can tell when somebody’s putting on a voice or you can recognise their voice within it but there’s quite a lot and they’re fully formed voices.

In the very first episode, I couldn’t work out if I’d asked somebody else to do one of the characters because I thought ‘where’d that come from’ and it was Richard. He’s done an amazing job of separating all the characters, it’s really good. I just wanted to point that out because he is a bit of a genius.

Richard O’Brien: Once again, if you’re not thinking about it…

I find doing voices easy if I’m not thinking about them. I remember being in a car once with some friends and I was talking about Robert Morley the actor and neither of them knew who he was. So I went into Robert Morley, the first time in my entire life, and did Robert Morley and both the people in the car knew exactly who I was talking about. But if somebody had asked me to do it and I was thinking about it, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

‘The Barren Author’ will be released 31 October 2020 
Price: £3.99 each episode or £19.95 for all 6 if bought together
http://www.spitefulpuppet.com

Click here for our interview with Sophie Aldred about The Barren Author