When David Wenham walked into rehearsals for A Christmas Carol in October, he felt the same way he did as a young actor preparing for his very first roles.
"First day of rehearsal, I'm [still] exactly the same. I'm extremely nervous because I don't know what's going to happen," he says.
The 57-year-old hasn't stepped onto a stage in almost a decade – since he played the guilt-ridden John Proctor in The Crucible at Melbourne Theatre Company in 2013.
But he doesn't feel rusty: "It feels like getting back on the bike again … It really does feel as though it was only a few weeks ago [that I was last on stage]."
Wenham has been lured back to the stage by the role of cantankerous Scrooge in an adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella, written by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and directed by Matthew Warchus (Matilda the Musical).
"[He's] a wonderful character to sink my teeth into," says Wenham.
"Characters that were at the extreme ends of society or the personality spectrum have always appealed to me."
Some of Wenham's most memorable characters meet this description – including his professional debut as the menacing Brett in Gordon Graham's The Boys, which premiered at Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney in 1991, before he starred in its film adaptation in 1998.
Others include the pyromaniac Doug in Louis Nowra's Cosi at Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre in 1992 (he also starred in the film adaptation in 1996), small-time criminal and heroin addict Johnny Francis "Spit" Spitieri in 2003 feature film Gettin' Square (for which he won an AFI Award for Best Actor), and disgraced underworld lawyer Andrew Fraser in 2011 miniseries Killing Time.
"[The Boys] was a very important piece in my career because it was an amazing piece of theatre, but then it ended up becoming a film, and that particular film opened up doors for me internationally," says Wenham.
Those international roles took Wenham away from Australia – where he had been nominated for a Logie for the role of "Diver Dan" in SeaChange – to star in big budget films such as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King, Van Helsing and 300.
Now A Christmas Carol, which is playing at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre, is taking him back to his first love: theatre.
His theatre origin story
The first plays Wenham saw as a kid, growing up in Marrickville in Sydney's Inner West, were produced by the semi-professional Genesian Theatre in the Sydney CBD – one of Australia's oldest theatre companies.
"They'd do things like Agatha Christie murder mysteries, or there was [T.S. Eliot's] Murder in the Cathedral," he says.
But he realised he wanted to be an actor after watching shows by the now-defunct Nimrod Theatre Company (formerly the occupant of the site now called Belvoir St Theatre), including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, and Australian playwright Nick Enright's musical The Venetian Twins.
"[Those plays] really marked me in a wonderful way. It just fired [up] my imagination," Wenham says.
"That was when I thought, 'OK, that's what I want to do. I want to perform on that stage [at Belvoir St] in a theatre company.'"
He studied acting at the University of Western Sydney, and soon after graduation he achieved his goal, starring at Belvoir in Stephen Abbott's The Headbutt in 1991, Cosi the following year, and as Ophelia's brother Laertes in Neil Armfield's production of Hamlet in 1994 (alongside Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh and Geoffrey Rush, incidentally).
Wenham's very first on-stage role had been in another Shakespeare, as the rebel Hotspur in a high school production of Henry IV, Part 1, at the age of 14.
"I thought I was pretty good back then, I gotta say," Wenham jokes.
One of his older sisters helped him prepare for the role, pulling apart the script with him.
"[As a] 14-year-old, Shakespeare — the language is seemingly impenetrable … [But] once I knew what it was all about, I just revelled in it," he says.
Revelling in language
In A Christmas Carol, Wenham is revelling in the language of both Dickens and Thorne, who adapted the novella for London's Old Vic Theatre, where it premiered in 2017 starring Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill).
Wenham aims to be faithful to Dickens's description of Scrooge: "He's 'scraping', he's 'wretched', he's 'solitary as an oyster'. They're delicious words to work with as an actor."
Over the course of the play, set on Christmas Eve, the wealthy miser Scrooge is visited first by the ghost of his late business partner, Marley, and then by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future, who confront him with his behaviour and encourage him to make amends. By the end of the show, he's a changed man.
Wenham says: "We see him at the beginning with seemingly no redeemable qualities whatsoever. He is selfish, he's insular, he is secretive, he is unremorseful … By the end of the play, he is exactly the opposite: he's benevolent, he is open, you couldn't find somebody who is more joyful than Scrooge.
"The challenge for me as an actor is trying to bridge those two gaps and to make the audience believe that that journey is actually possible."
In the OId Vic adaptation, Scrooge is on stage for the length of the play. He is also surrounded on three sides by the audience, with the stage jutting out into the auditorium.
"Therefore, the personality of the actor playing Scrooge is going to be very prominent in the production," Old Vic artistic director Matthew Warchus told ABC RN's The Stage Show in November.
Since 2017, the role of Scrooge has been taken up by a different actor in London each Christmas, including Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead) for a streamed lockdown edition in 2020.
Thorne's A Christmas Carol has also been mounted on Broadway, where it won five Tony Awards, including Best Costume Design and Best Sound Design, before a new Scrooge, Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), toured the production around the US.
"All the actors that have played Scrooge in this production so far are all quite different from each other. But they've all got a version of Scrooge that I can detect within them," Warchus says.
He last directed Wenham just over 20 years ago, in 1999, in the Australian premiere of the French comedy Art, by Yasmina Reza, where the actor played Yvan, who tries to keep the peace as his friends argue over an abstract painting.
This time, Warchus is not in the room with Wenham: Associate director Jamie Manton flew to Australia from London for rehearsals, alongside set and costume designer Rob Howell, choreographer Lizzi Dee and lighting designer Hugh Vanstone, with Warchus speaking to the cast over Zoom.
Warchus told The Stage Show that it was important to give an actor the freedom to inhabit Scrooge in their own way.
"It would be very stupid to put a straitjacket on a great actor and say: You need to do this, this and this; move there; say that line like that … You have to balance the freedom that will keep the performance alive, with the inherited structure and framework of the production."
Community spirit
While Wenham appreciates the language of the play, what appeals to him most is the collaborative nature of working in theatre.
"It's a team sport … everyone comes together to tell a shared story," he says.
His co-stars include Debra Lawrance (Please Like Me) as the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Bernard Curry (Savage River) as Scrooge's underpaid — but always affable — employee Bob Cratchit. The cast sings Christmas carols throughout the show, as well as dancing and playing fiddles and squeezeboxes.
Wenham says: "The sense of community within this particular group is really, really strong. And we're united in coming together to share this story in the most entertaining, moving and uplifting way possible."
After Scrooge learns the error of his ways, he finally begins to connect with the people around him, especially Cratchit. It's something Wenham has been thinking about in the wake of the pandemic.
"A solitary existence doesn't really work for humanity. We have to work together and theatre is the absolute microcosm of that," says Wenham.
The play too is about that sense of coming together as a community. To reflect that in real terms, the production has partnered with hunger relief charity Foodbank, collecting donations at the end of each show.
"The level of enthusiasm to donate at the end of the show has been completely overwhelming. They've had to get bigger collection bags," Wenham says.
Charity has long been a part of Wenham's life, growing up in a working-class family – his father, a fan of Dickens, volunteered for St Vincent de Paul for more than 50 years, while his mother would make extra meals for other families.
"We didn't have much money at all … but you wouldn't have known it at the time. My parents were forever putting the needs of others in the community ahead of their own," says Wenham.
"This show just takes me back to that moment in my life where the level of community spirit was, in my mind, very strong. And I think it's something that is needed a little bit more at the moment."
A Christmas Carol runs until December 29 at Comedy Theatre, Melbourne.
