Alistair McGowan to star in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion

We didn’t get off to the best start, Alistair McGowan and I.

I mention how much has changed since we last talked, when he accompanied his partner and fellow comedian Ronni Ancona to the Woodstock Literary Festival. “Like what?” he asks. Well, like the fact they are no longer together, and he is now married to someone else. Like the fact that he was writing and promoting her book at the time and hadn’t yet discovered his enormous passion for theatre. Like the fact that he is here to discuss his latest project George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion rather than comedy. “Well we were working together at the time,” he says rather curtly.

I understand his reticence — that’s all water under the bridge now, he’s moved on, life is different, and good, his talent triumphing over a whole host of new genres, unfurling like a gruff Scottish thistle in springtime. He’s happy goddammit, enough with the nostalgia!

So instead I concentrate on the present in which Alistair McGowan is apparently so at ease, and on the part of Henry Higgins which he dominated in the West End, and is now touring. “I first played him three years ago, taking over from Rupert Everett for the last three weeks of the run, so this is a completely new production,” he tells me. “It’s a really nice part to go back to. And while there was a slight sense of ‘been there done that already’, the director persuaded me there were still questions he wanted answered and that we hadn’t scratched the surface, that there was more depth to the part.”

It obviously worked because Alistair, who turns 50 this year, is now touring the country with Pygmalion, the precursor to My Fair Lady, and coming to Oxford Playhouse. And while touring means spending lots of time away from his new wife Charlotte Page, whom he met in a production of The Mikado, he is still enjoying himself.

“Well there’s pros and cons,” he says, refusing to be drawn. “Touring is part of the excitement for me because it’s a real eye-opener and very different from stand-up where you do a few gigs and go home every night. This is eight shows a week and your day off is spent travelling, so it’s quite demanding, but you do see some lovely places like Oxford.

“The downside is fatigue, accommodation where you don’t sleep because of the air conditioning, the beds aren’t right or late night drinking outside your room, that’s the worst, but you get used to it.”

Presumably he fills his time off stage by practising his impressions, storing them up for the next show, Pygmalion coming hot off the back of his sell-out stand-up tour. “We did 60 dates with lots of good voices and it went down very well,” he smiles.

It’s easy to forget McGowan is most famous for his impersonations, his BBC1 The Big Impression show launching him as a household name and winning numerous awards, including a BAFTA in 2003.

But this isn’t the case. “It’s very difficult to do both at the same time because the play is all-consuming and really, really hard. This is too big a commitment. Stand-up is hard enough but ask an impressionist like Jon Culshaw about the amount of work you need to put in to get the voices right — it’s three times as much.”

This urge to copy other people apparently originated around the McGowan kitchen table, where the family discussed the days events in character. So is that a skill or something more innate? “Yes it’s a skill but to be really good is about more than that, it’s about becoming someone else. I worked with Harry Hill for a while and while he loved doing accents he could not become someone else. He had too good a sense of who he was already.”

So is it the voice that’s hardest? “Sometimes you can just watch someone on the TV and get them first time, but then you’ve still got to work out the person themselves, the angle you’re going to use and your material, because you can’t turn up at Buxton Opera House and just do a voice, they’ll think ‘so what’.”

So someone like Raymond Blanc, whose accent is still strong after all these years, is that real? “Do you want the technical answer? It’s about changing the shape of your mouth and the way you use your facial muscles and French use a different mouth shape so is much harder to adapt.”

It’s not a long stretch, then, from impressions to acting? “No, it’s very very similar because on stage you throw yourself into a character, absorb and become them, rather than copying them.”

Alistair McGowan is the modern Henry Higgins then? “We have the same interests in sound and what accents say about us and where they come from. But more than that Henry Higgins really reminds me of my dad who passed away 10 years ago. They have so many similarities, so it’s a pleasure every night to channel my father.”

Isn’t Henry Higgins rather a mysogenist though? “I don’t think so, he’s more a man of his time and tries to treat everyone the same, but despite him Shaw is showing that women got treated differently, because this is set at the very beginning of the Suffragette movement.”

As for what’s next, a long overdue holiday for the McGowan household? “I’m not one for desert islands and travel, people forget that’s what actors spend their life doing, so when we get time off we go home, the one place we haven’t been. I’ll take some time off though to sit in the garden, with the cat, in the sun, reading a book.

“But I might answer the phone because I enjoy what comes next and I do like a change. That’s the pleasure of this lifestyle there’s lots of surprises and thrills.”

Alistair McGowan leads Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, from Tuesday 6 to Saturday 10 May at Oxford Playhouse. Box Office on 01865 305305 or book online at www.oxfordplayhouse.com