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Interviews
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The Nicest Wicked Queen of them all.... Sheila Connor talks to Craig Revel Horwood Craig Revel Horwood is most famous as the low-marking Mr. Nasty of the judging panel on the Strictly Come Dancing television programme which he thinks is ‘quite bizarre’. He spent fifteen years as a dancer and fifteen years as a highly respected director and choreographer, climbing to the top of his profession, yet it is a Saturday night television programme which has catapulted him into the public gaze and made him a household name. Previously he was almost anonymous, apart from his name on the credits, and it took him some time to get used to being recognised in the street. It was his work as director and choreographer, however, that brought him to the attention of the organisers of Strictly who wanted judges from the theatre world, as well as those from ballroom and Latin, and he brings the expertise from his daily life to evaluate, criticise and hopefully give the dancers some suggestions to improve. Cast for the second time as the Wicked Queen in Snow White, he arrived for his photo call and interview at the Hawth in Crawley in full flowing costume and make-up, complete with false eyelashes and vertiginously high heeled bright red court shoes, and I cheekily asked if he thought he was being type-cast. He laughed. It might surprise some people who watch the show to know he laughs a lot. “Well slightly,” he conceded. “I’m the wicked one on the TV programme so I suppose it does give people an opportunity to come and boo me which is really great fun, and I take it all in jest anyway. People last year were very funny. I finished the dance routine and they were shouting out numbers and scores - all good humour, and I can take criticism, you know. I put myself on the line as much as any other artist does and I take the criticism. I think you have to. “Strictly is really a very small part of what makes me me. It is so weird to go out shopping and find I’m being recognised, and the thought of me becoming public fodder was terrifying, but I’ve used it now to my advantage to be honest, to try and get bums on seats in the theatre. I think that’s what great about it. I can still both direct and choreograph and, hopefully, invite a television crowd to come and see a show. A lot of my shows are accessible and I do a lot of touring productions. My objective is to get people to come and see theatre. Go and see some of the stuff that’s going on there and see how wonderful the British actors and actresses really are.” Many of his productions began life in the tiny producing theatre, the Watermill at Newbury, a venue where he obviously loves to work, revelling in the challenges of having to use ingenuity, wit and humour to deal with lack of space, “I love the Watermill because it’s so small and intimate, plus you don’t get enormous big West End producers having a knife in your back and twisting it, having to make it work because they have spent twelve billion. It’s a place you can be really creative, a place where you can be unique in your work without it being judged too much by other people and having to change your concept of ideas just to suit an audience. That’s what I love about it - the sense of freedom that the place gives me. It’s only a 200 seater and a very small space to deal with, and I do the most amazingly ‘big’ musicals - with twelve people. Sunset Boulevard, Martin Guerre, The Hot Mikado, really huge big splashy musicals”. His latest shows, Spend Spend Spend and Chess are presently touring (to great acclaim) and I wondered if it was difficult to translate them to larger stages. “Going to a bigger space it just breathes a little bit more which I think is great, and that’s generally what the actors want. I make fun of the smaller spaces. Well, I use wit in that way, like having showgirls with ridiculously big costumes and only being able to fit two of them in, but a show like that on tour wouldn’t work because you’d need ten of them. I don’t think every show is right to tour; sometimes it should be venue specific. Copacabana this summer was venue specific and I had no intention of taking that out, but it was one of the most sold-out productions we had out of all of them - amazing!” Following in the footsteps of director John Doyle, Horwood mainly uses actor musicians for his musicals, known as a quadruple threat as they are expert in singing, dancing, acting and playing, and he makes full use of their talents, once having a double bass player tap dancing one rhythm while playing another. He doesn’t give them an easy ride, but then he doesn’t believe in compromise. His career path began in his homeland, Australia, where, after extensive ballet training as a good base (comparisons with Billy Elliot here), he landed his first professional job, at the age of seventeen, in West Side Story where he “fell in love with musicals and tap dancing” and particularly loves the teaching process and having some control over the whole play. “I love being on the opposite side of it, I really do, but this was quite frightening, coming back to performing, because of course there’s a lot of knives out there for me - especially the Press. They’ll have a field day with it, but I don’t care. They can say what they like about me,;the worst, at the moment, is over”. ‘The worst’ I assumed was the reports of some episodes in his earlier life and I asked if he had written his autobiography to set the record straight. “Yes, I wrote a book with the help of Alison Maloney which was good fun. I really enjoyed that. I wanted to let everyone know what happened to me before. I think people leaked everything and got paid for stories that were untrue, so I thought, well, I’m not having that in my life. This is what my life is, so I brought it out and then it’s over. I don’t particularly want anyone to be that interested in me, to be honest. I didn’t go out of my way to become well-known in that way”. As well as ‘getting bums on seats’ he is most anxious to encourage people, particularly the young, to exercise as a way of building up their ‘bone bank‘ and, together with Camilla Parker-Bowles, is a patron of the Osteoporosis society, trying to raise awareness of the condition and thinking he can help by encouraging people into getting up and dancing as a way of strengthening their bones to avoid trouble in later life, and somehow that brought us on to Anne Widdecombe. “I can completely understand why she’s doing Strictly. She’s up for a laugh and I think that’s brilliant, and you know she’s up for learning the steps as well. She does actually want to achieve them. She’s actually representing quite a lot of people in this country who look at that and think, ‘You know what - I think I might go and start dance lessons’ - and what better exercise? Most people as they get older just want to sit and watch telly, but it’s lovely to get some form of creative outlet, and it’s a great place to meet people.” Is there any work he is particularly proud of? “Well - the Ballet Boyz was one, that was a particular challenge for me because we didn’t know whether or not we would be absolutely slated for trying to bring two different worlds together because I’d just been training in Argentine tango and then I found this music which was absolutely perfect... two tango masters just fighting each other in orchestrations...classical ballet battling tango, battling each other and two men basically having an argument but loving one another. There was nothing homoerotic about it, it wasn’t meant to be, just two blokes together. That’s probably one of the more famous ones, apart from Spend Spend Spend - a proper British musical which has been really well written with great care and great creativity, and it’s just a wonderfully written organic piece that’s easy to stage.” After all he has achieved so far, what are his plans for the future? “Oh, Hollywood I’d say,” laughing again, but just a bit serious. “I wouldn’t mind doing a bit of film to do with dance, and I’m hoping to team up with the Ballet Boys because they’re getting into that media and I would really love to do that. Something sort of arty-farty and small, nothing big budgety, something I’d be really proud to do, because then it’s there for ever. Within theatre you can have a special moment and you never see that moment again but it remains in your body and your soul and your conscienceness. Film would preserve it and it also goes to a mass audience. Far from being Mr. Nasty, Craig Revel Horwood is one of the nicest people I have met in the theatre world, and most certainly the very nicest Wicked Queen.
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