Actor Brian Cox has postponed his upcoming national tour just weeks before it was due to begin.
The 79-year-old Succession star was set to launch his 18-date one-man show – It’s All About Me! – on 1 October at the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton.
Cox told BBC Newscast his busy year and packed schedule have left him ‘tired’ and unprepared for the tour.
He said: ‘I just thought I’ll do it some time, [October is] just too soon.’
He also confirmed that he going to take his new film Glenrothan – the first he has directed – to the Toronto Film Festival next month, further filling up his schedule.
‘It’s been very busy and I just thought “I can’t be doing it,”‘ he said.
The tour would have also included stops at the Corn Exchange in Ipswich on October 3 and the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend-on-Sea on October 20.
Recently, Cox has been busy performing in Make it Happen in Edinburgh.
The new musical explores the real-life drama of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the government bailout after its collapse, with Cox playing founder of free market economics, Adam Smith.
The news follows Cox – who first performed in Edinburgh with the Royal Lyceum Theatre company in 1965 – speaking out about the modern state of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
At a UK Government gathering of cultural leaders at the recently revamped Filmhouse cinema, actor Brian Cox used the launch of a new partnership between the Scotland Office and the Fringe Society to call for a practical overhaul of Edinburgh’s world-famous festivals.
‘I sort of find myself in a really weird position,” Cox admitted, according to The Herald. ‘Everybody’s talking about art. I want to talk about practical matters — about how we coordinate everything.’
While he acknowledged that ‘chaos’ has always been part of the charm of both the Fringe and the International Festival, he warned that the lack of coordination between the two was undermining their success.
‘The problem about chaos is it’s chaotic,’ he said, pointing to competing box offices and fragmented scheduling as major issues.
‘There needs to be greater coordination, just practically, in order to make things function properly,’ Cox argued.
‘The charm is in the work — how we see the work, and how people pay for the work. At the moment, half the charm of Edinburgh is its chaos, but that’s only half the charm.’
He urged organisers to ‘think of a way of really coordinating events a bit more than we do so we can practically deal with stuff that is a little impractical at the moment. It’s just not good enough, quite frankly. Bugger the art — I’m really worried about bringing it all together properly, without chaos or chaoticness.’
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