Meet actor, director and writer Mark Gatiss as he directs his husband in a new play heading to Yorkshire

It was then that his husband, the actor and playwright Ian Hallard – they married in the historic middle Temple in the City of London way back in 2008 – turned and asked Mark if they could quickly discuss an issue with the new play that they are about to take on tour across the UK.

Mark laughs: “I won’t say that I gave him short-shrift, or that I was in any way rude, but I made it very clear that anything at all that was work-related was definitely not going to be open for discussion that day. And I mean, nothing! I think that I said: ‘I just don’t want to talk about it’, and we left it quietly at that.”

Both Mark and Ian have strong Yorkshire links, for each went to college here – Mark to Bretton Hall (where he studied Theatre Arts), and Ian to Sheffield University. “Extraordinarily happy times”, recalls Mark, “because for me, that’s where I met up with most of the old The League of Gentlemen team. Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson.” But, he says rather wistfully, “it’s no longer a college, is it? Ian was up in Rotherham a few years back, playing dame in their pantomime, and we went over to look at the old place. It’s all rather forlorn and very sad, boarded up, with bars at the windows. That couldn’t get in the way of some great memories, but, there was a definite air of melancholy and desolation to the place. I learn that there are plans to turn it into a hotel? It deserves something like that, it would be a crime to demolish it altogether. It was very much part of my formative years.

“We both love Yorkshire a lot – we don’t get back half as much as we would like to. I think that the last time we appeared together there was at the old West Yorkshire Playhouse, when we were in a revival of The Boys in the Band which, I’m very pleased to say, went down rather well.”

That new play is a comedy, The Way Old Friends Do. Sounds familiar? It’s an Abba song from their 1980 hit album Super Trooper. Ian has written the drama (and will appear in it) and Mark will direct. He explains: “It’s all about two old friends meeting up after 20 or more years, and resuming their friendship. And then they decide that it would be a lot of fun to start up an Abba tribute band. Where everyone in the act is in drag. Ian’s rather used to that – having played panto so much over the years – I had my fair share of slipping into frock when we were doing League on TV, and later on tour, but it’s not my forte now.”

In fact, he recalls being in a production a few years back in which he was required to have a sword fight, “and the choreography of it took forever, and it filled me with dread. I absolutely hated it. I got it together eventually, but it’s not something I’d want to do again. We were rehearsing The Way Old Friends Do in the very same space in London the other week, and just walking down the corridor gave me a bit of a turn, triggering memories that had me thinking about that rather painful experience.”

In the Old Friends group, the story unfolds that the wanna-be Abba imitators are just getting together for laughs and a bit of fun – until a genuine tribute bank, booked to play a local theatre, drops out and the amateurs are drafted in. So what’s he like at directing his partner, the performer and in this case the dramatist as well? Mark chuckles and says: “Pretty good, I think. We’ve been getting along pretty well for so long that a play isn’t going to come between us. And if something major comes up, I am hardly likely to be confrontational in front of the rest of the cast.”

How did the two meet? “On a dating site,” says Mark, “as simple as that – in the way back when, and in simpler times. It seemed quite ordinary to us both. The only remarkable thing was that we’d never ever met each other before – working in the same industry, with the same tastes. We both found out that we had the same interests, and it all seemed to slot into place – on a dating site one day, and we met the day after. Looking back, it all seems pretty ordinary. I don’t think that either of us have ever fully rationalised the fact that, many people, if you are single, toddle off to a bar or a pub, looking for romance and your life partner, your one true love, and that you are surprised that they are never ever discovered in that location. Almost inevitably, you go home alone. At least we knew that there was a certain compatibility in several areas before we met! We had lots in common”.

“When we’re writing our own individual projects, whatever they may be, Ian writes in one room, and I am in another. He can have music on it the background as he goes along, I have to have complete silence. We are as different as that”.

Gatiss, now 56, cannot be pigeon-holed. He’s written extensively for the re-boot of Dr. Who, and received praise for his involvement with Sherlock. He’s played the put-upon Johnny Craddock (husband to the imperious TV cook Fanny) and pop Svengali Malcolm McLaren, who was instrumental in starting the career of Boy George. He’s been in everything from Game of Thrones to Wolf Hall and Inside No.9. The man seems to glide effortlessly from project to project, bringing a deft originality to everything he does. His own next stage appearance will be at The National, in London, playing the late Sir John Gielgud in The Motive and the Cue, a new play by Jack Thorne which examines the relationship between the great Shakespearean and Richard Burton, when the latter is offered the role of Hamlet, to be directed by the former. Mark explains: “Two ages of theatre on a collision course”. He is clearly slightly phased by the fact that Gielgud never admitted his own sexuality in public, “and said several times to other gay actors that ‘coming out’ was something that he could never do in public. Odd, because he’d appeared in court on a charge of importuning in a public place, and everyone knew about it”

And Mark’s last TV performance was equally memorable – he appeared as the comic Larry Grayson in ITV’s Nolly, an account of the demise of actress Noelle Gordon. “The Queen of television losing her crown” is Mark’s description. “I loved doing that one”, he offers. “There was one particular scene, in Larry’s dressing room, in which the two, who were indeed the greatest of friends, lamenting that fame brought a lot of benefits and rewards – but at the cost, in many cases, of one’s private life. In both Larry – and Sir John’s case – it was how they felt that gay men of their time were perceived. Who on earth could ever have dreamed that Grayson and Gielgud could have so much in common?”

The Way Old Friends Do, Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield, March 7 – 11. York Theatre Royal, June 6 – 10.