MARK THOMAS: BRAVO FIGARO!

Ropetackle Arts Centre, Little High Street, Shoreham, Wednesday, January 21

Best known for attacking corporate crime and Government incompetence, Mark Thomas is bringing two of his most personal theatre shows to Sussex.

Bravo Figaro!, which won a Fringe First and Herald Angel when he took it to Edinburgh in 2012, celebrates his late father and his love of opera. It is at the Ropetackle next week ahead of an antipodean tour.

And in March he is bringing his new show, Cuckooed to Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, detailing the true story of a betrayal of trust when a close friend turned out to be a paid spy for arms manufacturer BAE Systems.

He admits not much in Bravo Figaro! has changed since 2012.

But it has gained an extra personal poignancy after the death of his father, which happened on the morning of a live BBC Radio 4 recording of the show at the Royal Opera House.

“He died as he lived, an inveterate heckler,” says Thomas, who asked that the recording opened with an announcement about his father’s death.

He was carried along on the day by supportive and comforting messages on Twitter, but a month later he found performing three further shows really hard.

“It’s really interesting to come back to it now having had some time,” he says.

Bravo Figaro! tells the story of Thomas’s father Colin – a self-employed builder with a love of opera, whose life crumbles when he is diagnosed with the rare degenerative condition progressive supra-nuclear palsy. It follows Thomas’s attempts to reconcile their sometimes difficult relationship and reconnect with him through his favourite music.

“It is a celebration of the fact you manage to hold people dear despite our differences and conflicts,” says Thomas. “You can have a difficult relationship with someone and still love them.”

He says the aspect he most enjoys now is when people come to him after the show to share their own stories.

“It’s like a gift that we give to each other.”

Bravo Figaro! sees him interact with recordings of his parents’ voices – something he has built on with Cuckooed by including interviews with friends who also knew the spy.

“I wanted to find different ways of communicating stories to an audience,” he says of the show, which also won a Fringe First in 2014.

“I don’t describe myself as a stand-up, I’m a writer and performer. What I do is a mixture of theatre, stand-up and journalism.”

He admits the discovery he had been spied on by someone he thought was a friend was painful.

“We went to defend this guy for a year when everyone was saying he was spying on us,” says Thomas. “There was a real sense of not only being betrayed, but also blaming ourselves for being so stupid. I think it is a small part of a much bigger story. If a police officer wants to search my house he has to get a warrant and go through a judicial procedure. If a spy is a friend of mine I invite them in. It’s an incredible collusion by the state and corporations.”

The experience has changed how Thomas thinks about surveillance.

“I always used to laugh at the activists who would remove their sim cards from their phones before having a meeting so they weren’t recorded,” he says.

“Having read Edward Snowden’s revelations I realise it was a sensible thing to do.

“Now we are very practical when we discover something like this has happened – we take legal action immediately. You can get paranoid about it, but the best thing to do is to serve papers.”

Thomas has embarked on a legal case against the Metropolitan Police, along with five fellow members of the National Union Of Journalists, after discovering the force had been collecting information on him and monitoring his actions since 1998.

All six journalists in the case had previously exposed state or corporate wrong-doing and pursued claims about police misconduct.

“The recent events we have just witnessed [in Paris] involve the type of people they should be putting surveillance on,” he says. “There’s some irony in putting journalists under surveillance while David Cameron is marching to save press freedom.”

  • Mark Thomas’s new show Cuckooed is at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange in Church Street, on Thursday, March 5, 7.30pm, £16/£14. Call 01273 709709 for tickets.

Starts 8pm, tickets £14. Call 01273 464440