Peach of a role

“I’m trying to represent the town as best I can,” jokes Hodgson, who is based in Newcastle as an actor, but returns regularly to his parents’ home in Darlington.

“I’ve been an assistant producer on Jabberwocky Market and I also worked at the Civic Theatre for a while, so I’ve still got strong roots in the town. I went to Mowden Junior School and my dad was a teacher at Egglescliffe, on Teesside, so I actually moved on to that school as a senior, but I’ve still got loads of friends who went on to Hummersknott and Carmel schools,” he adds.

His family and friends will be attending the launch of this year’s Christmas show at Northern Stage, which he’s excited about because David Woods’ adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1961 classic novel has been given a real musical twist by director Mark Calvert, designer Rhys Jarman and jazz-inspired music director Jeremy Bradfield.

The fantastical storyline involves a small boy escaping the horrible world created by his two cruel aunts and taking to the sky in a giant peach with a band of magically-altered garden insects.

“I’m confident this will be a family show with a little bit for everyone. James is seven, isn’t he? A quick bit of maths means I have to take off 17 years to play him. So, 17 years and a lot of shaving is a bit brutal. A lot of what the director Mark has been talking about is not pretending to be a child, but just trying to become a youngster who sees the world in a new way. James discovers things as he goes along, and that’s what is interesting for me because it’s so lodged in our memories as a story that you almost forget it’s such a bizarre tale about a young boy meeting giant insects.

“I was able to actually think about insects becoming his friends for the first time and travelling across the ocean in a giant peach and ending up in New York.”

Hodgson read the book as a child, although started off with George’s Marvellous Medicine – like generations of children – before devouring as many Dahl books as he could find. “It’s lovely to be re-visiting it and being able to play around with it and tell the story in a good way. The idea is to become a convincing child and how the other characters respond to him on stage. I think you will see that small child, but there’s also a soundtrack of big band music, lindy-hop and musicals. So this is a little boy with a big double bass, which is what I’m playing, and allowing the audience to get lost in the music.

“My first instrument was the guitar, which was quite portable and they’ve been slowly getting bigger and bigger and I’ve ended up with the biggest one on stage. Carting it along to rehearsals and moving it around on stage is an absolute nightmare. We’ve pretty much got a fantastic jazz band with saxophone, trumpet, clarinet, a nice woodwind section, drums, piano and keyboard. What we didn’t have was any kind of bass, so I stepped in. I think it’s going to be one of the most interesting challenges over 60 or so shows because I learnt how to play it for this show. What helps me is that I previously played bass guitar, and Jeremy Bradfield thought I could do it and I told them at the audition stage that I’d give it a bit of a go. It’s nice to keep learning in jobs,” says Hodgson.

It sounds almost as difficult as tying 500 seagulls to the peach, which is how James and his friends manage to make the fruit fly.

“Yes, exactly, and the lassoing of the seagulls involves a routine of double-Dutch skipping and all that kind of thing. With every page, Mark would come in each morning with a new idea. We kept expecting to have one easy day, but there wasn’t one because then would come, ‘And now we’ve got to lasso 500 seagulls while doing a skipping routine’. It was quite crazy, but a lot of fun as well.”

The music of Duke Ellington and Cole Porter, plus the strains of West Side Story, have been added to the soundtrack of the show which has set itself a big goal of expanding into both Northern Stage performance spaces meaning the production will be virtually in the round.

“We have eight actors and a further six members of the ensemble to fill this exciting space. All the insects seem to look like old-fashioned jazz musicians. There’s the ladybird, centipede, old green grasshopper, Miss Spider and the earthworm. There’s a couple of characters, like the glowworm, who didn’t make it from the book. The song lyrics were in place already, but the original production didn’t have actor-musicians. It was only the grasshopper with a violin and a small band providing the mood music. It wasn’t a musical like our production,” says Hodgson.

“I saw the theatre space for the first time this week and it’s quite phenomenally big. But when you’re in the middle it still feels surprisingly intimate. I think the audience will have a good seat wherever they sit. There are lots of interactive elements, like beachballs being thrown around, and I’m not sure whether I can tell you if a surprise giant peach might appear. This is the biggest space that Northern Stage has used in years, but it should still feel like a cosy Christmas show,” he adds.

Having the peach et al flying around for most of act two will be another challenge for the cast and creatives, plus an underwater scene to contend with. “With each turning page this show is non-stop and I think anyone would struggle to become bored,” says the actor.

The interesting link between director and lead is that Calvert was one of the first members of Northern Stage’s original acting ensemble, while Hodgson came from the company’s independent North programme, which was introduced to find new talent after the ensemble was scrapped.

“There were a few rounds of auditions and it took a couple of months for me to land the part. This has been a great year for me,” says Hodgson, who will be returning to the North-East company, The Letter Room, to tour a joint production with the Royal Shakespeare Company in January when his Peach of a role comes to rest at the end of the year.

n James and the Giant Peach runs until Saturday, December 31. Box Office: 0191-230-5151 or northernstage.co.uk