Interview with James McArdle (Thomas)
An interview with James McArdle, who plays Thomas
Published: 20 July 2017
Thomas is confident about who he is and is not afraid to be himself, in a world which rejects him. Thomas just gets sadder and lonelier.
Tell me about Man in an Orange Shirt? How did it first come to you?
I was doing a play at the National called Platonov, and I had a gap of a couple of months before my next job. I was thinking, oh good, but then my agent - the tenacious woman that she is, said no - you should read this script. I read it and I was hooked. It wasn’t patronising. It was romantic, which I was surprised at and glad about.
Do you think it is a love story?
Yeah - I hope so. I was a bit annoyed when it was announced and people kept saying it was the BBC doing a ‘gay drama’, because you wouldn’t call Romeo and Juliet a heterosexual drama, you would just call it a love story. This is not a homosexual drama, it is a love story between these two men. It is just a love story that happens to be set in the 1940s, where it was illegal for them to be themselves.
Tell us about your character
I play a character called Thomas March who is an artist, a war artist. When he's not painting soldiers he lives a sort of bohemian lifestyle in London. He falls in love with Captain Michael Berryman - they have this huge, whirlwind romance and Thomas falls hook line and sinker and it sort of defines his whole life, he can’t quite escape it. Thomas is much more confident about who he is and is not afraid to be himself, in a world which rejects him. Whereas Michael - unfortunately for Thomas - wants to go back on the heteronormative path and that leaves Thomas heartbroken. Thomas just gets sadder and lonelier.
An introduction, by Patrick Gale
My commission to write this show couldn’t have been more fortuitous: Commissioning Editor Lucy Richer let it be known she was after a script reflecting gay male experience in the 20th century, which ideally would have the flavour of a Patrick Gale novel.
Happily she said this to Kudos’s Sue Swift, who just happened to be an old friend from my days of bridge addiction. With such a vast subject, I had to find an involving, intimate story within it and, as with so many of my novels, this was a fragment of narrative from my own life.
When my mother was pregnant with me and preparing for us to move - from Camp Hill Prison on the Isle of Wight to Wandsworth, where my father was to become governor - she found a stash of personal letters hidden in his desk. At first she was amused, assuming they were from an old girlfriend he’d never mentioned, then horrified, as she realised they were from an old school and university friend who had been his best man.
In real life she destroyed the letters, terrified he’d be arrested for what was then an imprisonable offence but also disgusted because, in her ignorance, she assumed this meant he was a paedophile. In true buttoned-up English fashion, she never let him know what she had discovered.
What I’ve done in Man In An Orange Shirt is to take that scene of discovery and wind backwards, imagining the two men’s impossible love for each other being shipwrecked on the demands of respectability and the law. And then I’ve wound forwards from it, imagining what would have happened if my mother had instead confronted my father with the discovery. Readers of my novels will know I’m a psychotherapist manqué, fascinated by the effects of secrets and lies within a family.
Man In An Orange Shirt takes those secrets and lies and imagines the long-range damage they might do if the understandably embittered wife of episode one went on, in episode two, to find that her grandson was yearning for the fulfilment her late husband had never known.
Although it’s brilliant that transmission will coincide with the BBC’s celebration of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, I hope this is much more than just a drama about gay men and their difficulties.
I hope that its two love stories will touch people simply as love stories, and that the torments and frustrations in the family I portray will set viewers wondering about their own ancestors, grandparents and parents - and what secrets and lies they might be concealing.
GK
