The Inbetweeners and The Office star David Schaal leads cast in new play about sitcoms, Jumping The Shark, coming to The Kings Theatre, Southsea | Interview

But this is the setting for Jumping The Shark, a brand new play celebrating the sitcom, which comes to The Kings Theatre, Southsea this month on its premiere tour.

Pam, Gavin, Morgan, Dale and Amy are all linked by the ambition to realise their dreams through comedy.

Frank Donohue, the finest sitcom writer of his generation, has flown in from Los Angeles to conduct a seminar teaching his five lucky disciples how to write the perfect TV sitcom. But as he reveals the tricks of the trade, their everyday lives are exposed, leading to mix ups, farcical revelations… and gut-wrenching tragedy.

It is written by David Cantor and Michael Kingsbury, writer of BBC hits My Family, Two Pints of Lager & A Packet of Crisps, and co-creator of the West End and touring sensation Round The Horne… Revisited.

The six-strong cast stars David Schaal (The Office, The Inbetweeners), Harry Visinoni (Coronation Street), Sarah Moyle (BBC’s Doctors), Jasmine Armfield (EastEnders), Robin Sebastian (BBC1’s Babs: The True Story of a British Icon) and Jack Trueman (Shark Bait).

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The Guide caught up with David on their final day of rehearsals before opening at the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds.

So how’s it been going? ‘It’s fantastic! We've got two actors in the cast, Jasmine and Harry who were in EastEnders and Coronation Street respectively, and essentially this is their stage debut but they've both taken to it like ducks to water.’

David plays Frank – and there are similarities between the two.

‘Frank, in the play, he's reputed to have gone over to LA and done some work over there. I went off to LA to work as an actor, to do pilot season, and also had my five minutes of fame with The Office and The Inbetweeners – Frank had a hit sitcom called Batter, so he's just written his first show in 20 years.

‘He's on the comeback trail, and I like to think my career has never really nosedived but that's not strictly true...’ he laughs. ‘I have carried on working, whereas Frank has been sort of in the wilderness for 20 years.

‘Frank is quintessentially English – he's a bit like [Only Fools and Horses creator] John Sullivan, that old-style English writer. He's a bit of a Londoner. He's someone who's not that keen on LA! But because he's been successful he's got that outward confidence and desire to pass on his knowledge, or as he calls it in the play "pass on the light".’

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The play taps into the idea that many people think they have a novel in them – or in this case, a sitcom.

‘I think people watch them on TV and they're so slick and so well constructed that people think it's easy,’ says David. ‘A lot of people like to think of themselves as comedians or the pub joker, that kind of thing, so it looks easy.

‘Most people would be able to sit down and write a scene, but sitting down and writing an entire script where it's all going to knit together and there's a character arc, and you've got to set up the punchline, create those builds and then the undercuts, it's not quite as simple as it may appear. It is a fine art.

‘I think that's what's going to attract people to this play too – the idea that this guy is giving a masterclass, just the word “masterclass” will probably attract people – they'll think, “Ooh, I'm going to learn how to do this, I might change my career after seeing this play!”’

A quick glance down David’s resume and you can see he certainly has kept himself busy – he has more than 100 film and TV credits to his name, and numerous plays on top of that.

Had he crossed paths with any of his fellow cast before?

‘I have done lots and lots of TV! Sarah Moyle played Valerie the receptionist in [long-running BBC1 day-time soap] Doctors for about 10 years, and we can't remember if we've worked together or not. I've done Doctors about four times, playing different characters and I reminded her of this episode I did where I held the surgery at gunpoint while having a heart attack and she said: “Oh that was just the average Doctors episode!”, so she couldn't remember if we were ever in the same scene either.’

Landing the role of Frank involved a nice bit of serendipity for David.

‘I went to [London fringe theatre] The White Bear with a friend to see a play and while I was in there some people came up and asked me to have selfies because they recognised me as Jay's dad from The Inbetweeners. As I was doing this, Michael Kingsley the director came over and said “Hello David," and we hadn't seen each other in 30 years. I did a play at The White Bear when I first trying to be an actor – Slaughtering The Pig – and I had worked with Michael on that. And he says, “You know what? I think you might be absolutely perfect for this play we're currently casting”.

‘So I read the script, loved it, and thought it was right up my street. The next thing I knew I was cast in the play. It really was as simple as that – I didn't even have to audition.

‘That's only ever happened to me one other time – when I came back from America and my manager rang me and said, “Can you be in Cornwall tomorrow?” Yeah, Why? He said, “I've got you four episodes of a show called Frontier which was shown on Netflix”. That was a fantastic show starring Jason Momoa, Alun Armstrong and a lot of other incredible actors.’

As the above anecdote demonstrates, The Inbetweeners looms large over much of what David has done. He played Jay’s dad Terry in the classic sitcom, forever undercutting his son’s outrageous exaggerations. Although it originally aired from 2008 to 2010, thanks to two two hugely successful films, endless repeats and streaming, it remains popular.

‘The hair's thinner and greyer, but I don't think I look that much different to then,’ says David, ‘so I do still get recognised for it – it happened last night in the pub here in Bury St Edmunds. It's less regular now, but it still happens. I always know when it's been back on TV because that's when I start to get recognised again!’

He also gets spotted as Glynn, aka Taffy, the warehouse manager from another modern sitcom classic – The Office. Despite his huge body of other work, David doesn’t mind that these two shows are the ones people know him most for.

‘I just feel incredibly lucky – it's the actor's dream. The fact that I worked with Ricky Gervais before anyone really knew who he was, and [The Office’s co-creator] Stephen Merchant as well – I've just been so lucky. And then working with Damon Beesley and Iain Morris on the Inbetweeners – it turns out they liked my character from The Office, and Jay's dad is kind of like a reincarnation of Taffy!

‘Apart from that I've had a pretty good theatre career, often in small-case off West End venues, but I've done a couple of West End gigs as well. But I've been very lucky – last year I was in Rome shooting a series called Domina,’ an historical drama being aired on Sky Atlantic.

David is actually American by birth – and although he lives in the UK, remains an American citizen.

‘I do still have an American passport – I've never actually had a British one, believe it or not! I should have got one ages ago. But back in the day the Americans wouldn't allow you to pledge allegiance to a “foreign power” as they called it. I believe that at one point, if I wanted a British passport, I would have had to surrender my American passport and I didn't want to do that.

'That's different now, but to be honest, I've never gotten around to it, despite the fact my mother is English.’

David’s father was in the American air force so the family would often move around, but they decided to relocate to England in the aftermath of 1969’s Hurricane Camille.

‘We were stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi, where we experienced the world's worst hurricane – at that time. To this day it's only second in its velocity to Katrina. We were in a trailer which got overturned, but we survived that, and then my dad said, “I've had enough of this travelling, let's go back to England and I'm going to get out of the airforce”. We settled in Stevenage when I was seven.’

Jumping The Shark is at The Kings Theatre, Southsea from Thursday-Saturday, February 16-18. Go to kingsportsmouth.co.uk.