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Interviews
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Nigel Planer - In Planer Words Sandra Giorgetti talks to Nigel Planer whose second play, Death of Long Pig, is currently playing at the Finborough Theatre.
And the wind awoke my heart Again to go a-sailing o'er the sea In Death of Long Pig the day that Robert Louis Stevenson dies of a brain haemorrhage is juxtaposed with that of Paul Gauguin's suicide attempt. It's a carefully researched dark piece, but not without comic moments. The bringing together of the deaths of a tuberculate writer and a syphilitic painter begged the question how did the idea come to Planer? It turns out it all started with a photograph .... "I have always been interested in Stevenson. It came from a photograph of Stevenson actually that I've been hanging onto for years - he is very photogenic and interesting to look at. He had the capacity - I can't remember who said it - to make people fall in love with him and he was famously able to talk the legs off a donkey. "I amassed more pictures of Stevenson and read and I became very interested in him. He wrote all these adventure stories but he had a very adventurous life [himself] - after four years voyaging round the South Pacific he went to Samoa and never set foot back in Europe or Scotland again. "To write about him hadn't occurred to me until 2003: I found myself in the centenary exhibition Gauguin in Tahiti in Paris by chance. I knew nothing about him, I happened to be there and was very, very excited by the Tahiti exhibition and started to piece together in my mind a fantasy of why these two men were there at the same time. "After spending a year trying to write a play where the two of them met and argued in a fantasy world, I sort of reached the conclusion that they could be played by the same actor … and a play could be made about running away to paradise, but in fact when you run away you tend to take your own problems with you and Stevenson and Gauguin, that's exactly what happened to them." In a quirky repetition of history, just as Stevenson had funded his crossing of the South Pacific on the royalties of Jekyll and Hyde and some travel writing commissions, Planer followed in his footsteps, or rather his ebb, and sailed across the South Seas, visiting the houses and graves of Stevenson and Gauguin. It was "a wonderful trip of a lifetime. I was on a cargo boat going round the Marquesas [The Marquesas Islands] but it was a French cargo boat with a very good chef on board and a library. A south seas library, so that's what I call fun research. "I've been writing travel pieces for about ten years, occasional travel pieces, not a proper journalist; proper journalists would hate me because obviously the travel pieces are jammy. I suppose I'm what you'd call a trepid traveller rather than an intrepid traveller so occasionally I get the chance to write about places, and on this occasion I wrote about five pieces and I managed to finance the trip right across the South Pacific which was, you know, bloody brilliant!" All human beings are commingled out of good and evil In the play's first act we see optimistic Stevenson who has learnt to enjoy life having understood from eight years old that his tuberculosis would not grant him old age; in the second act we see the opposing, darker outlook represented by Gauguin. Another artist, this time disappointed, angry and railing against society. When he revives from his unsuccessful suicide attempt he says "... it seems I am condemned to life... There is no justice, that's the trouble ...". The play shows two sides of human nature but doesn't deliver a clear conclusion. "It's not big on plot. If people go looking for a plot... expecting it to have a plot resolution, they'll be disappointed. The play is two slices, it's a .... it's a thesis and antithesis and the audience can go and make their own synthesis. It's more like a poetic splash at something ... It's better to imply, it can be more effective." Dual nature, it struck me, came up before in Planer's writing. In his novel Faking It Oliver and Barry are 'sensitive and herbal-tea' versus 'prurient and intoxicant': was there more than just a passing interest in the Jekyll and Hyde notion or was I reading too much into a coincidence? "The dark and the light? I suppose so, to some extent. You see the same action from different perspectives and they seem different, they have a different moral take ... It's the right one to have picked Stevenson and Gauguin to be Jekyll and Hyde because the fiction that was around at the time that Gauguin was reading was about transformations, about duality, Jekyll and Hyde being the best example, but if you think about it: Frankenstein, Dracula... People were just beginning to think that may be people have something else going on inside, the dark side. What Stevenson called 'the other fellow'. "Interestingly - something I've only just discovered last week - was that the painting that Gauguin painted before committing suicide, Where Are We From, What Am I And Where Am I Going? is what Frankenstein says, 'What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?' I've been studying Gauguin and Stevenson and duality and this subject for about four years now and I only found that one last week ... there's no reason he shouldn't have been quoting Frankenstein." Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself Planer's first play, On the Ceiling, was initially produced at Birmingham Rep and then transferred to the Garrick in London. Death of Long Pig had a lower profile start to life and a different trajectory. "I sent it to the Finborough Literary Department because I looked at their brief and it seemed to be the only place that would be wanting it. The Finborough has a brilliant literary department - amazing because that's an unsubsidised theatre - they've got their brief written out very, very clearly for anybody to follow. I sent the script in with the form under a pseudonym because I thought I don't want to look like I'm kind of playing at it or barging my way round but everybody thought 'Well, that's just stupid'. "Alex Summers [the play's director] was the assistant director there for a year and they set him the task of reading all of the plays that came in. He really liked it because it stuck out as being different from all the usual subject matter and that it's two actual points in time where everything comes to bear. "So we did a workshop at the Finborough and I did a couple of re-writes and then we did a second rehearsed reading at Henry James' house in Rye. In the open air which was a fantastic chance to do it, in the gardens competing against seagulls! "Death of Long Pig was never conceived as something that might have legs - that sounds stupid - I'm just saying in the intention... And you can never tell what's going to work but Alex, very intense young director, wanted to get his teeth into something and me, just obsessed with this subject matter, and we just got sort of obsessed with getting the play on. "We're hoping to take Death of Long Pig to the Traverse in Edinburgh. We're trying to go to Scotland for Scottish Homecoming Year. And my personal ambition would be to take it to New Zealand because I think that down that way all of this stuff that people find so extraordinary about the south seas, they know all about in New Zealand. These characters, Stevenson, Gauguin, Captain Cook all of the history of it, is part of their heritage, part of their culture. "I learnt a lot I think from On the Ceiling, especially because I've had two more chances with it. It's been put on at the Landor Theatre and then it's been on the radio. "The Landor picked it up and did it without my knowledge, but seeing it done straight off the page like that really was a lesson. And they'd done some brilliant things with it - Robert McWhir from the Landor - they'd just made such simple choices, it made me realise 'Oh, all that complicated thinking!' "And I just found that so completely refreshing. Instead of it expanding he'd obviously contracted it which made it much better and I sort of took the baton with that when going for the radio. "I did quite a big job on improving it for the radio and cutting out the extraneous stuff and making the plot - again plot in the loosest sense of the word - but making what is actually happening much clearer. The whole thing was much jollier on the radio." Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted mostly Nigel Planer is currently in the West End production of Hairspray, playing Wilbur. When I met with him last week it was between rehearsing in a new Edna, Brian Conley, and an evening performance of the blockbuster musical. Given his tight schedule and his well-recorded appetite for sweet things, I took along some cake. He is very good at eating and not talking with his mouth full and he explained how things were going. "Really well. It's going to be good though it does make it difficult in the evenings - I am driving Michael [Ball] mad because he puts his hand out expecting my hand to be somewhere and I've just learnt the other way; it's hard enough for me having to learn new steps and new hand positions anyway, so I am learning that in the day and at night I have to go back to the other version and my brain just can't do it! They're very similar but just completely the opposite sometimes, like off on the left foot not off on the right. Oh, its driving me mad!" With a run in the original productions of Wicked, We Will Rock You, Chicago and Evita under his belt, I can't help feeling he's probably just fine at it. Planer's commitment to Hairspray goes through until October and apart from the proposal to take Death of Long Pig to Scotland, he's not saying if he has other plans. As well as two novels, he has written inter alia, the autobiographical A Good Enough Dad¸ pieces as his alter-ego Nicholas Craig, and two spoofs on divorce and therapy; he has published a collection of poetry and penned scripts for The Magic Roundabout. He may be best-known as Neil from the BBC's The Young Ones but his television career extends well beyond that - Shine on Harvey Moon, The Grimleys and Unnatural Pursuits. He has a modest list of films on his CV including Tony Britten's version of Puccini's La Bohème, and he has a successful voice acting career too on Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, The Magic Roundabout and also as Dr Marmalade in SpongeBob SquarePants. With such a protean talent who knows what to expect next? "Death of Long Pig "is at the Finborough Theatre until 1 August 2009 with evening performances Tuesday to Saturday at 7.30pm, and Saturday and Sunday matinées at 3.00pm. Nigel Planer is in "Hairspray" at the Shaftesbury Theatre currently booking until 24 October. Performances run Monday to Saturday at 7.30pm and matinées on Thursday and Saturday at 3pm. Brian Conley joins the cast on Monday, 27 July 2009. All quotations - Robert Louis Stevenson
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