VIDEO: Watch Dave Hearn talk to Phil Hewitt/SussexWorld as The Time Machine heads to Eastbourne

But it’s not necessarily The Time Machine as we know it, says Dave. It will be at the Devonshire Park Theatre from March 21-25 in a version written by Steven Canny and John Nicholson and directed by Orla O’Loughlin.

“Basically it's about three actors trying to put on a version of The Time Machine and my character is H G Wells’ great great grandson and he believes that H G Wells could time travel. It's about them trying to do this show and then basically a big event happens at the end of Act One and then it is really something quite different. I’d better not say more. It's best just to see it but it really is a show of two completely different halves. The first half is about setting up the characters and talking about time travel and the second-half, as I say, is very different.

“We are touring until the end of April. It is the brainchild of the two writers Steven and John but actually myself and the two other actors and the director had a rehearsal process that was really a workshop. We had ten days of rewrites which was extremely exciting and challenging. We had some pretty hefty changes.”

The company behind it all is Original Theatre: “They have done some Agatha Christie scripts and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and actually The Hound of the Baskervilles was the show that I saw because a friend of mine was in it and it was a similar vibe to this, three actors trying to retell the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

Dave, an actor and founding member of the Olivier Award-winning Mischief Theatre, the team behind the Goes Wrong shows, is enjoying being on the road: “I have done a few tours but actually the first big proper tour I did was The Play That Goes Wrong some years ago. We first started The Play That Goes Wrong just in a room above a pub, and our first audience was ten or 12 people and only four of those paid anything to watch it! It really did start in the smallest way and then it grew quite quickly but also quite slowly. It did the pub and then another run at the pub and then some theatres and then Edinburgh and then we had that leap from Edinburgh to it becoming a two-act play. And then we had a three-week tour that turned into a 26-week tour and then we started in the West End straight after that. It just kind of went up step by step.” It is now coming up to ten years in the West End: “I just think it was a combination of the right people at the right time. The reason we were doing it was because none of us could get any work. I left drama school without an agent and none of us were able to work. But I think the thing that made it enjoyable was the fact that we were able to keep working at it. We were able to try it in front of all sorts of different audiences for the first six months, the pub audience, the traditional theatre audience, the Edinburgh audience and then into the West End. We got to go around the whole country refining it every day.”

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