Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
set around the exploits of a military concert party of British soldiers in Singapore and Malaysia during the Malayan Emergency of the late 1940s. The cast was put through its paces by a former drill instructor with the Scots Guards. Twenty years later, just as Serkis was opening in King Kong all around the world, the Dukes’ archivist Bernard Gladstone remembered in the Lancashire Evening Post just how keen Serkis had been to get involved in everything. ‘Whether it was a musical, a panto or a serious play, he wanted to be in it. He was always full of life, and always keen to play oddball characters.’
‘We had strong work ethics and practices,’ Serkis has said of his time in rep in Lancaster, ‘and you had to get this amount of subsistence. I remember getting the regional Equity deputy to come down to us. I was quite militant, saying, “We’re not going to do this, unless we get our proper money.”’ It was a stance worth taking in Serkis’s view, shared by countless others in the arts, because of the sharp cuts to regional theatre funding under Margaret Thatcher’s three terms as prime minister. But, all the same, ‘the whole thing just got demoralised and every actor had to do more work for less’. On the other hand, did it mean that it was worth making actors hungrier to make their mark, in order to find out that they really wanted to act? Anyone whose heart wasn’t quite in it would soon find out. ‘People who really wanted to do it found a way there,’ admitted Serkis. ‘By hook or by crook, they worked out their contracts. People really, really went for it, because they believed that that’s what they wanted to do.’
Serkis’s time in rep under Petherbridge would be an invaluable apprenticeship. He later said of his artistic director, ‘His philosophy really affected me for a long time, in terms of how the theatre related to the community, and his whole attitude towards theatre being about storytelling, and the power of changing a local community with theatre. I carried that ethos for a long time.’ The communal nature of the Playhouse’s environment extended to some of the actors helping with musical content on some productions, and jazz lover Serkis would enhance several productions with his saxophone playing.
Some of Petherbridge’s workshops were inspired by the work of the Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, who founded the Theatre of the Oppressed. One of Boal’s techniques was to visit South American communities and encourage the people, who were not professional actors or playwrights, to devise their own plays based on their own experiences and difficulties. ‘They’d literally workshop what their common problems were for wherever they lived,’ said Serkis. ‘If it was oppression by the police, it would be that.’ Any production like this would be sufficiently open for any member of an audience watching the play to become part of it, to take over the role of the protagonist and influence the direction of the story. But Boal also believed that the way to act was to research, and bring back evidence to feed into a role. ‘The job is to bring back the evidence,’ explained Serkis. ‘Go out, research it as thoroughly as possible, inhabit it, bring it back, and get it to the audience.’
It was quite a principle, one that pushed an actor to be responsible and communicative, the very antithesis of self-indulgence. Only by investigating a part as thoroughly as possible could an actor hope to access the full persona of a character, and then be able to convey their findings to their fellow performers, a director and an audience. Serkis was eager to conduct this level of research, although, in retrospect, he had to admit to an occasional part that failed to fire him up in the right way. He regarded Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Dukes in October 1985 as one of his misfires. On the whole, it was well received, and the presentation was novel: the Dukes auditorium was converted so that the audience was on the move throughout, following the cast of 11 around the arena; the actors also functioned as ushers, musicians and guides for the audiences, who were themselves unofficially cast as onlookers to the action that unfolded. One newspaper review recommended that any paying customers should bring ‘sensible shoes and a cushion’.
Serkis found his own reading of Prince Florizel somewhat lacking: if the job of acting is to investigate a character and report back to the audience, he felt he had floundered during The Winter’s Tale’s four-week run. ‘I found nothing of any interest to show anybody,’ he confessed in 2003. ‘It’s only in hindsight that you realise that you’ve completely fucked up, basically. It’s just a sense of feeling totally unrooted, and that’s because you’ve not found something to connect with.’
Even so, if Serkis felt that he fell short on one play at the Dukes, there would be another one along within a few weeks or – at most – a month. Repertory theatre work required any actor to be versatile and flexible, and Serkis would find himself during 1986 and 1987 appearing in everything from pantomimes to Agatha Christie mysteries, and from musicals to specially commissioned works by local writers. ‘They all required different skills, playing different age ranges, completely different parts of society.’
Still only in his early twenties, Serkis was battling to establish an identity for himself, both as a young man and as a stage performer. He was obliged to imagine experiences that had not happened to him. What might it be like to play a man apprehensive about his impending marriage to a neurotic fiancée? He could explore such thoughts and feelings when cast as thirtysomething Paul in the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. Similarly, how might he react if his own career prospects in acting were compromised by a physical injury? A part as an ageing thespian in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser provided food for thought. How would he contrast his performances as two different newspaper editors in the same play (as he would in Howard Brenton and David Hare’s satire on the news media, Pravda)? Onstage and off, Andy Serkis was growing up fast.
Such was the diverse nature of the Dukes’ productions that the lack of typecasting encouraged actors like Serkis to attempt lots of working methods rather than rely on one single approach to performance. Serkis, for his part, found it unhelpful to have his mind crammed with the spectres of his previous characters, and would try his hardest to stay in the moment with any part: ‘I just tend to stick to the relevant – the world that we’re creating, wherever the director’s leading you.’
After performing in more than a dozen different plays at the Dukes Playhouse, Andy Serkis took his leave of Lancaster in 1987. He had been mostly resident there for nearly five years, and through university and rep theatre had already learnt so much. ‘My enjoyment of acting comes from inhabiting other characters,’ he would later say. ‘To be able to do that so regularly, and to be performing one and then rehearsing another…It was just a joy, really.’ It was a wealth of useful material he would call upon in his future career.
Performing with touring theatre companies would bring some fresh practical challenges. While it would be fun to visit a new town every week, the accommodation would often be cramped. ‘Of course, you’re doing it for no money, and you’re doing it all yourself – that’s enjoyable, at that level, when you’re that age.’ For a man in his twenties, it was another stage in a career adventure. ‘They were great days, because they were formative years. It was the stuff you really believed in – and I’m not saying I don’t believe in stuff now, because I do – but it was just fuelled by that youthful enthusiasm.’
Serkis’s Lancaster swansong (in July 1987) was as Lysander in the Shakespeare comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was staged outdoors, at the city’s 40-acre Williamson Park. A few years later, Jonathan Petherbridge explained to the Independent why the park was an ideal space for works by the Bard. ‘The audience feel they’re going through the same experience as the young lovers. You have to plan it carefully, though, to keep the structure clear. And few writers apart from Shakespeare have broad enough shoulders to take outdoor productions.’
Serkis and the director would reunite in the future, most notably in 1990, on another open-air project: Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. By the summer of that year, Petherbridge was running the London Bubble Tent, whose speciality lay in organising plays in parks in and around London. The Bubble Tent’s priority was to entertain, but hopefully not in a superficial fashion. ‘Half our audience doesn’t go to see any other theatre,’ the director told the Independent. ‘People come because it’s colourful. In the evening, the tent has a wonderful atmosphere – and if it rains you feel like boy scouts.’