Around World In 80 Days – without leaving Eastbourne

Nicholas Maude will lead us on an epic adventure in a brand-new retelling of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days at the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne from August 5-27.
Nicholas Maude as Phileas Fogg Around the World in 80 DaysNicholas Maude as Phileas Fogg Around the World in 80 Days
Nicholas Maude as Phileas Fogg Around the World in 80 Days

He will be Phileas Fogg – a role he’s delighted to be playing. In fact, he’s delighted simply to be working.

Nicholas comes to the production hot off a tour of Private Lives alongside Nigel Havers and Patricia Hodge; and after Around the World in 80 Days, he will be taking up a role in The Mousetrap for its 70th anniversary.

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“I feel very blessed and amazed to be wo rking, to have come off one thing and straight into this and then to be going off to another.

"I feel so blessed after all that we went through with Covid. I'm just going to go for the ride and enjoy it. You just cannot take anything for granted.

"The theatres are doing all that they can and people are taking precautions but everything is a risk at the moment, just putting on a show.”

The theatre is promising Around the World in 80 Days as the perfect summer treat for all ages, packed with comedy, music, physical theatre, circus skills and clowning, clever use of stage props and an especially built set.

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“That's all going to be part of the challenge and that's the fun. You get elephant rides and you get sleigh rides, but I'm not saying anything about a balloon... I would just point out that the balloon is not actually in the original book. It was just in the David Niven movie.”

As for the role, as Nicolas says, an actor inevitably brings big parts of themselves to what they do: “But you have to say that Phileas Fogg doesn't appear to be someone who is very open to feelings or emotions. He is very British of that era in that sense, very reserved and doesn't give much away. So I suppose I'm trying to find those moments where you can find little chinks in his armour, where you can see little things that might make him a little bit more human. He is pretty straight all the way through but by the end he's got to fall in love! So you've got to find those little moments that make that plausible. But it's going to have to happen quite quickly! You've only got an hour and a half. But you've got to show those little elements of his character coming through so that his falling in love is actually believable.”

Nicholas has played Eastbourne several times before, first at the Devonshire Park 20 years ago in a piece called Taking Steps and then he was back in Eastbourne in 2010 in The Sound of Music.

Before this current job, he was on the road with Private Lives.

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“And we went to quite a lot of seaside places and you have to say that some of them were rather run down. But you feel that the lovely thing about Eastbourne is that it has had an injection of money and it is looking good which is why it's so lovely to do something here, in a town where there really is passion and commitment to the theatre.”