CityLife

Matt's route from comedy to tragedy

IT doesn’t take long for Matt Lucas to drop the serious luvvie façade and break into one of those grotesque comic characterisations which have made him a household name.

He’s telling me that the person he’s portraying in stage play Prick Up Your Ears was a man who, “Shpoke in a way that made him shound ash though hish tongue wash too big for hish mouth,” all the while adopting a village idiot grin and moving his head slowly from side to side.

In an instant, I’m sitting in the same room as Vicky Pollard, wheelchair fraud Andy Pipkin and that terrible old raconteur Sir Bernard Chumley.

But unlike Sir Bernard, Lucas is quietly confident and not a bit self-important.

Lucas has a ruddy red complexion and looks to have lost weight, although it might just be the effect of seeing him in the flesh.

He’s tucking into something noodle-y during a break from rehearsals in a studio just a few paces from the Young Vic theatre in Southwark, London, happy to be interviewed at the same time.

I’m here in London because Prick Up Your Ears will be performed at The Lowry, Salford Quays, between August 31 and September 5.

The last time Lucas was in a play was in Taboo – the Boy George story – in London and he went to see the touring production of the show at the Lowry, which he really liked. He liked visiting Canal Street, too.

In Prick Up Your Ears, Lucas plays Kenneth Halliwell, the less successful and increasingly bitter boyfriend of author Joe Orton, a part played in the 1987 film of the same name by Alfred Molina.

The lovers had met at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts in 1951, where they started out as struggling actors and ended up as struggling writers.

Tension mounted as Orton’s career blossomed while Halliwell’s failed even to bud. Consumed with rage at the injustice of it all, Halliwell murdered Orton with nine hammer blows to the head before overdosing on Nembutal sleeping pills.

It’s hardly the stuff of Little Britain sketches, then.

The cast came together when Lucas saw fellow actor Chris New (Orton) performing in director Daniel Kramer’s stage production of Bent.

They were both eating in the same theatrical haunt a year later and Lucas approached New’s table to say how much he’d enjoyed the show, at which point New “pitched” his flatmate’s suggestion that the two would be perfect as the main characters in Prick Up Your Ears.

“I said, ‘Let’s do that then and we shook hands,” Lucas recalls.
A week later they had a meeting with Prick Up Your Ears producer Sonia Friedman, whose sister’s partner just happened to have directed Little Britain Live.

But that was two years ago.

“We were going to do it about a year ago. We were all set to do it, and Tim Burton asked me to be in Alice In Wonderland, and I was like: ‘Oh, I’ve got to do that’,” Lucas explains.

“Sonia has very kindly indulged me while I did that last year.”

And there was another reason why Lucas is happy to have waited until 2010 to bring Kenneth back to life.

Last year he divorced his partner of six years and husband of 18 months, Kevin McGee.

He says: “I think actually, without focusing too much on it, I was going through some personal changes in my life last year – going through divorce – and I think it would have been too much for me at that time.

“It’s probably fortuitous that we waited for a year because this process has been very intense. We’re playing real people, who lived fairly recently, and we had to do them justice. I think in my character’s case, there’s the mental disintegration of the character, and so I had to access real emotions and I don’t think I could have done that last year.

“But this year, just as I’m getting myself back together, I’m able to disturb myself.”

The original plan was to ask Alan Bennett to write an adaptation of his screenplay for the stage. He wasn’t available but gave his blessing.

This version of the story is a new play written by Simon Bent and inspired by both the John Lahr biography of Orton and the writer’s own diaries.

The play is set entirely in the claustrophobic flat shared by Orton and Halliwell and boasts only three cast members, the third being Gwen Taylor as the matriarchal Mrs Corden, a character based loosely on the men’s neighbours.

A significant difference between this play and the other versions of the story which have been told is the more sympathetic hearing given to Halliwell.

Lucas won’t be playing Halliwell as a grotesque – quite the opposite in fact.

“This is a 2009 reading of events, because I think we’re more inclined now to look at somebody who will take their own life and kill somebody else as as much of a victim,” he adds.

Despicable

“Back then, 25 years ago, there was a lot of anger directed towards Ken. There was a feeling that it was a despicable thing to do and it was – he took somebody’s life. It was a terrible thing to do.

“What we’ve found is that the people who knew Ken had a little bit more warmth towards him than was displayed in John Lahr’s book.

“We met their next door neighbour, who is 89, and who would have seen them virtually every day. We’ve met lots of people like that and they’re much more forgiving and sympathetic towards Ken. No-one justifies his behaviour but they understand him.

“He had psychiatric issues, he had addictions and it got on top of him and he made terrible decisions.
“Kenneth Halliwell was seven-years-old when his mother died, stung by a wasp. A few years later he came downstairs and found his dad with his head in the oven.

“Today we’re able to look at that and say that the seeds of depression and de-sensitivity against death were sowed at a very young age.

“With a little bit more distance we can maybe look at things in a different way and be more sympathetic.

“There was warmth between them but things got out of hand. No relationship is just pure aggression. There are loving moments. And that’s something we didn’t think had been told before.”

Somewhat surprisingly, given the dark nature of the subject matter, Lucas, 36, says he was able to draw on his talents as a comedian.
I ask whether he’s comedian or actor these days and he quips:

“Some people say neither!”

He adds: “Comedy and tragedy are always two sides of the same coin.

“Funny things happen at funerals, don’t they?

“We have moments in the final scene, where this character meets this gruesome end, where Kenneth is imploring Joe to move to Croydon, and it’s funny, because it’s provincial.

“All of a sudden, even though we have these star-crossed lovers having this kind of battle and we know where it’s heading, they’re talking about Croydon.”

Fans of Lucas the comedian will be relieved to hear that there’s more original material to come from him and writing partner David Walliams.

It’s clear that there are no tensions in their relationship.

“Next year it will be 20 years since we met and 15 years since we started writing together,” Lucas adds.

“For us it works because we still make each other laugh.

“And the things we’ve been working on together, which no one has seen yet, but that we’ve been working on for the last six or nine months, I think are the best things we’ve ever done by quite some stretch.

“That’s because we’ve become, over the years, quite instinctive and we know each other so well that we complete each other’s sentences.

“You realise that working with Gwen and Chris, that it’s something you have to build. We’re brothers.

“That’s how we feel. It’s really important that we give each other space but we do socialise as well.

“Last summer we realised that we’d booked our holidays to the same place. And we didn’t really talk about work, we just relaxed.

“You have to nurture it. You have to tend it like a garden. Maybe that’s what Kenneth and Joe didn’t do.”

Prick Up Your Ears is at The Lowry from Bank Holiday Monday until Saturday, September 5. £24-£26. Call 0870 787 5780.