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Most recognisable as playing Billy Corkhill in Brookside and various other TV series such as Mersey Beat and Prime Suspect, John McArdle has also had a rich theatre career.
So with this pedigree behind him, it is a little surprising that with Mike Yeaman’s Canoeing for Beginners, the actor is making his Liverpool Royal Court Theatre debut, alongside another debutant at the theatre, Pauline Fleming, best remembered for playing Mike Baldwin’s wife Penny King in Coronation Street.
“I think The Royal Court is the only theatre in Liverpool I’ve not worked in before and it’s not that I haven’t been asked but more that I’ve been unavailable, which in a way is a good thing because it obviously means I’ve been working,” John explains during rehearsals for the show. “It’s been a busy period and it’s one that seen me come back home quite a bit.”
Canoeing for Beginners is based around the story of a man, Frank, played by McArdle, who fakes his own death by getting into a canoe and paddling out of Crosby Marina.
His wife, Beryl [Fleming], is ready to claim the insurance money but she needs to keep her nerve as the police and their two grown up children are sticking their oar in.
Frank’s a bit of an idiot, really; a guy who is nice but struggling to make ends meet and, so, comes up with this brainwave. He also has two kids but, in his wisdom, only tells his wife what he’s up to and it is Beryl who is really the brains behind the operation.
He suffers panic attacks, and something like this really isn’t good for his health so this is a situation that’s pretty much guaranteed laughs as we see him slowly – or not so slowly, at times – unravel.
“There were pretty much two things that convinced me to play Frank,” John says, “that the story Mike Yeaman has written is very good and, also, the fact that Cal McCrystal is directing.
I worked with Cal when I first started off many years ago in The Wind in the Willows at The Chester Gateway Theatre in about 1982.
Since then I’ve followed his career closely and now, thirty years later, when the chance came up to work with him again, it was too good an opportunity to miss.
He is such a fine director to work with and his track record speaks for itself, what with his involvement in the movies Paddington recently and Spiderman 2, as well as his stage involvement with One Man, Two Guv’nors with James Cordon.
Cal has this innate ability to make a script better, no matter how good the script already is, and that is a true art in itself. What really stands out about the play is that it has a story that audiences will care about.
Even though what they’re doing, on the face of it, is wrong I think audiences will sympathise with this family.”
John’s career may well be littered with notable roles in some remarkable productions, but it wasn’t the life he envisaged as a young man.
“I used to be a scaffolder, working in Australia. When I came back I realised I didn’t want to do that as a job for the rest of my life.
“I’d always quite fancied giving acting a go, found I wasn’t too bad at it and enrolled at college and then Drama School in London when I was 26 and this is what I’ve done ever since.”
And in between acting for TV and touring in theatres nationwide, John has also somehow found the time to write his autobiography. “I love working and although I do like to take a break between projects and come home for a while, I do find I get itchy feet so writing the book seemed like a good idea.
“It has taken about 3 years to complete, was much harder than I thought and it’s only thanks to an author friend of mine, who has been really encouraging, that I stuck with it.”
“Writing the book has been a truly cathartic process and, in this Google age, you can find things out that you wouldn’t have known otherwise. For instance, when I was living in New Guinea when I was younger, I knew next to nothing about the place outside of my own experiences of it.
“Doing some digging unearthed some fascinating aspects of the history of the country, though, and I have included some of the more relevant bits of what I’ve found in the autobiography.
“It’s written quite conversationally as well, as it is intended as a letter to my father, who passed away when I was 16 and subsequently missed out on what I am doing now; that’s where the book really starts, but it also covers a little of what happened in my life before then.”
John has also just finished a major theatre tour of Brassed Off playing Danny, the part made famous by another Liverpool acting great, the late Pete Postlethwaite. “It was wonderful being a part of such a rich, evocative story for six months because you learn to do so much with parts like that which are out of your comfort zone.
“Conducting in front of a different brass band every week isn’t easy, I can tell you, but each one were marvelous to work with and it made me appreciate the music so much more because it is, when you listen to it properly, fabulous stuff.”
Canoeing for Beginners runs at The Liverpool Royal Court Theatre from January 30th until February 28th. For tickets: http://www.royalcourtliverpool.co.uk/whats-on/canoeing-for-beginners