The actor, who is playing Scrooge on stage, is a fan of Christmas games – and quizzes in particular. But there’s one question he can’t answer: why are Christmas cracker jokes so bad?
Stephen Mangan, one of the most disarmingly likable comic actors around, is not obvious casting for Dickens’s isolated, abject, miserly Scrooge. But sitting in a dressing room on a December afternoon, he appears unnervingly transformed. His good-looking, rueful face with its great outbreak of a smile (familiar from TV shows such as Green Wing and Episodes) is topped with a thick grey mop of hair which he has had specially dyed to look the part in A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic. “It took seven hours at the hairdresser to get it bleached – my scalp was in bits”, he volunteers. And he has a new grey beard to match. “Mangan actually means luxuriant growth of hair – ‘mang’ is a type of mane,” he laughs – which sounds like the esoteric answer to a quiz question I have not asked.
Mangan, 53, is a huge fan of quizzes: “I’ve always loved quizzes, linguistic puzzles, logic challenges and silly stuff,” he says, and we start to chat about the seasonal pleasure of Christmas games and the lively scene from Jack Thorne’s stage adaptation of Dickens’s novel in which Scrooge’s nephew and friends rack their brains: is it an animal? Does it live? Does it growl? Eventually, they crack it. The answer to their riddle is: Mr Scrooge himself.