Rock on Tommy

There can't be many subjects that provoke chicken impressions from the interviewee and tears from the interviewer. But that was Tommy Cooper for you - a befuddled giant in a fez, who convulsed audiences with his hopeless attempts at magic and his uncanny comic timing.

The chicken impressions come from Simon Callow describing one of his favourite Cooper jokes, where he's arrested for using fowl language. The tears come from me when he describes seeing the footage of Cooper's death in 1984 on stage at Her Majesty's Theatre, which was televised live.

'It's amazing to watch the tape: the audience screamed with laughter. People didn't know it wasn't part of the show. He had a throat mike on so you could hear his death rattle, and the audience thought that was great,' says Callow, before noticing my damp cheeks and adding: 'But that's how he would have liked to have died; nothing would have pleased him more than to think people laughed. Any performer would want to go like that - it's not given to many people.'

That tragic night forms the jumpingoff point for Jus' Like That, a play about Cooper's life directed by Callow and starring Jerome Flynn as the much-loved comedian. Such a formidably high-brow actor as Callow somehow seems an unlikely Cooper fan. 'I don't watch TV, so he impinged on me in a rather distant way,' he admits, 'but I'm now convinced he was by far the greatest comedian since the war.

'He wasn't just a comedian but a clown as well. Clowns seem to be deformed in some way, as if they have been struck by a thunderbolt from the gods. Tommy was huge, with enormous hands and feet: he could move very gracefully, with a lot of frivolous, feminine moves, but then he could become this man mountain.'

There was also something beguilingly innocent about Cooper, whose jokes were utterly surreal and never malicious. 'Almost all of his gags were in common circulation but their antiquity is, in a way, charming,' explains Callow. 'It reaches some deep part of you, maybe the childish part of you. Children scream with laughter when they discover the possibility of telling jokes, and Tommy somehow tapped into that.'

And, of course, it was absolutely compelling to watch someone fail time and again to pull off those usually highly polished magic tricks. 'Technically speaking, Tommy probably wasn't a very good magician, but he was obsessed with it,' says Callow. His act was about his love of magic and his failure to really do it. In a funny way, it's almost a satire on magic but it only came from great love.'

Flynn, who must recreate this unique character on stage, may seem a surprising choice for the lead role, given his previous Soldier Soldier and Robson & Jerome fame. 'He has been obsessed with Tommy for a long time,' says Callow. 'Sometimes on stage, it's a bit scary. He doesn't actually look like him, and yet when he gives in to the image he becomes him in a remarkable way. I know the audience feel the presence of Tommy.'

There's a fine line to tread here, though, between straight impersonation and conveying someone's life story, which must have taxed Callow as director. He agrees that if the play were just an impersonation there would be little point to it. 'The interplay between an audience and Tommy could be a really wonderful thing and that's what you get with our show: we're recreating the impact that person had,' he insists.

Another directorial headache must have been coping with the fact that most of Cooper's routines seemed utterly chaotic. 'It's the hardest thing to rehearse,' agrees Callow. 'In Tommy's case, it wasn't carefully calculated: the guys in the booth lived in terror; they never knew what was going to happen next.