Keith Allen: ‘I was on stage in Gaslight, and completely forgot what play I was in’

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Keith Allen was the entertainment industry’s troublemaker-in-chief. He worked hard – several comedy series, a few films, a hit single or two – but played harder, spending countless coke fuelled evenings at the Groucho Club with Blur bassist Alex James and artist Damien Hirst. Who would have thought his rollercoaster career would lead him here, starring as Scrooge in Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – A Ghost Story at Nottingham Playhouse?

“To be honest with you, I’m not very aware of the arc of my career,” Allen says when asked that very question. “I’ve lived my life in the moment. I’ve always just gone from one thing to the next. And, to be truthful, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve always been in the right place at about the right time. Other circumstances have allowed me to express what talent I have got. I’ve just been lucky.”

Born in 1953, Allen’s childhood was nomadic, bouncing between boarding school and borstal. He spent some time at drama school and worked as a butcher, a miner, a fisherman and a West End stagehand, before success as a stand-up comedian thrust him into the heady world of 1990s showbiz. 

Apocryphal stories abound him: that he was expelled from boarding school for swapping the chapel organ’s pipes around; that he was sacked as a stagehand after joining a Max Bygraves’ chorus line completely naked; that his unofficial 1998 World Cup anthem Vindaloo, co-created with James and Hirst, originated during a drunken night at the Groucho; that Mohamed Al-Fayed funded him to make a documentary about the death of Princess Diana that has never seen the light of day.

What is certain is Allen has passed his performance genes on to his children. His son Alfie featured in Game of Thrones and recently starred in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen on Broadway, while his daughter Lily has transitioned from award-winning pop star to actor, making her West End debut in 2:22: A Ghost Story in 2021 and in McDonagh’s The Pillowman this year. 

Allen’s own theatrical career has spanned six decades, beginning with an all-male Macbeth in Glasgow in 1979 – “I lied my way in,” he says – and including roles everywhere from the National Theatre to New York. He has a particular affinity with Harold Pinter, having appeared in three revivals of The Homecoming. 

Allen has calmed down over the past two decades, and now lives a quiet life in Gloucestershire. What does it take to tempt the 70-year-old away from his rural idyll? Does he have a high bar for working? “I’d like to say yes, I’m careful about what I do,” Allen says. “But I have done a lot of shit.”