The man who brought us the much-loved (and missed) Mad As Hell is back – in his first theatrical role in a decade.
Shaun Micallef is wearing a dapper navy pin-striped suit when we meet in the Playhouse Theatre at the Arts Centre, where he will soon be treading the boards for the Melbourne Theatre Company in Uncle Vanya. “It’s from the wardrobe department at the ABC,” he tells me. “In fact, everything I’m wearing is.”
As ever with Micallef, it’s hard to tell if he’s serious. It’s that twinkle in the eye, that wry smile, that keeps you guessing.
Next month, the former lawyer turned sketch comedian turned host, co-creator and executive producer of the long-running and much-missed Mad As Hell will be bringing some of that sense of mischief to the stage. He plays Professor Serebryakov in Anton Chekhov’s famous play, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith, as part of a top-notch cast that also includes Daniel Henshall as Vanya, Philippa Northeast as Sonya, Fayssal Bazzi as Astrov and Catherine Van-Davies as Yelena.
It’s his first stage role in a decade, since he and long-time collaborator Francis Greenslade performed in The Odd Couple in 2016.
“Every 10 years I come back to haunt the MTC,” he jokes. “I mean, it’d be nice if I was called a little more frequently, but that’s all right.”
Uncle Vanya is a social comedy, of sorts. But being Chekhov, it’s also rather dark. So when the call came from Anne-Louise Sarks, the play’s director (and the MTC’s artistic director and CEO), Micallef was a little surprised.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s out of left field, that’s new, that’s a challenge’. And so I said yes to it. It had never entered my head that I would ever be in that world, so I was in straight away.”
Only then, he quips, did he begin to wonder why he had been approached.
“Oh, hang on, he’s the old fellow,” he told himself. “And I thought maybe it’s just my hair, no makeup required for this role. Maybe I just saved them money.”
You didn’t worry that it might have been because he’s old, pompous, and a bit of an A-hole?
“I think these are certainly very important ingredients I have obviously exuded over my career,” he jokes. “But also, you know, it’s a funny play.”
Micallef has been a fixture on our screens since 1994. But, he insists, “my natural sympathies lie with the writer. If I was to fill out a form before entering a country, my occupation would be writer, with a lower-case W. I’m a little embarrassed about calling myself an actor or a comedian. Performer sounds like I’m on some sort of rope or pole.”
Like at a strip club?
“Yeah. But isn’t that what we all are? We’re all displaying something to a bunch of strangers to get their approval. Isn’t it all some form of whoredom – no judgement at all on any aspect of that.”
Part of the thrill of doing a play as well known and revered as this is “that I’m serving the text. You can honour a story told by somebody else, rather than doing the usual stuff I do on television. My writing tends to cover my deficiencies as a performer.”
The nerves that used to come with performing live have largely dissipated. So has the desperate need to wring every last laugh out of a scenario.
“I’m increasingly of the opinion that to get a laugh, you don’t try to be funny,” he says, admitting it’s a well-established rule of thumb, “but it’s taken me a long time to not break it, because sometimes you’re on stage or in front of the camera and you think, ‘I’ve just got to squeeze it a bit’, and then I’m losing the audience.”
He’s never lost the Mad As Hell fans, though; if he declared tomorrow that he wanted to bring back the show that ran for 11 years and 15 seasons on the ABC, there would be wild rejoicing in the streets.
I ask him, of course. The good news is he doesn’t directly say never. The bad news? He doesn’t give any sense that it’s on the cards either.
“I genuinely wanted a younger, and probably more diverse, voice to be able to explore what was happening in the week,” he says, restating the reason he gave for winding up the show in 2022. “It hasn’t quite happened yet. Tony Armstrong did a show [Always Was Tonight] at the beginning of this year, which is reason for hope.”
Satire is always going to upset some people, and political comedy by its nature risks alienating half (or more) of the audience. Mad As Hell, he insists, worked because it was created by a tight team who had worked together for years, “and we all knew where we were with a joke, it was a hive mind”.
It dealt with politics, of course, “but I’m not a satirist, and I’m not an activist, and ultimately I didn’t really have any barrow to push. What I do is what I used to do as a lawyer, really, just explore something. I’d go, ‘OK, well, this is interesting, it’s more than a binary point of view, so let’s make it a debate where all these different ideas get to fire off’.”
He and Gary McCaffrie, the show’s co-creator, had a working rule, he says. “If you were before Senate Estimates, and you were asked to give the reason you decided to do that joke, what would your justification be? If we could argue the point without jokes, then we’d keep it in. If we don’t feel it’s worthwhile, or we have no logical reason we’re doing it, then it’s just an outrage laugh.”
He thinks imagining himself into Estimates – the nightmare reality of all who work in senior management at the ABC – is “fair enough, too. I think you should be answerable for the things you do at the public’s expense.”
Were you ever actually mad as hell about the state of things? Well yes, he concedes, but if he let it show the program suffered.
“When there were things that I was actually cross about, something went south in terms of getting a laugh from the audience. I didn’t want righteous applause or whooping during anything we did, and when we occasionally veered into that territory I used to cut it out because it didn’t feel right tonally.”
You might make a joke because “you are actually pissed off about something,” he says, “but the joke itself can’t necessarily be an expression of that. It’s a sublimation of it. Yes, we were mad, but in the service of the jokes, rather than it just being a chance for us to vent.”
And what of Uncle Vanya? It could be read as an expression of frustration at the slow transfer of intergenerational wealth – a topic as relevant now as it was when it was first performed in 1899. Is there any rage there, do you think?
“It’s a story of boomers, you could view it that way,” he says. “People rubbing their hands, going, ‘When are these people going to die?’
“It’s certainly funny to watch these rather privileged people who think the world revolves around them as they discuss very petty things and first-world problems,” Micallef says. And if MTC audiences feel just a little implicated, so much the better.
“The best sort of laugh is when you’re not laughing at someone else,” he says, “but you’re kind of laughing at yourself.”
Uncle Vanya is at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, July 21 to August 22. Details: mtc.com.au
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