Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
Hollywood Nights (where he would share the limelight with another rising star, the comic improvisational actor and singer Josie Lawrence), but it was the following spring that he became involved in the most ambitious and gruelling project of his career up to that point: a two-part, seven-hour epic tragedy at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, west London.
Faust – based on a German legend – was a cross between a play and a long poem, which had been written in the early nineteenth century by the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A sprawling circus of a production that blended folklore, philosophy, romance, theology and broad humour, its sheer spectacle and length meant that no one had attempted to stage it in Britain thus far in the twentieth century. Few had even tried to bring it to life in its German homeland. Under the guidance of opera director David Freeman, the cast of 12 actors (led by Simon Callow in the title role) and one musician had their work cut out, with multiple roles for some of the company: Serkis would play eight different roles across the duology. A great deal of physical stamina and agility was additionally required of the players, who had to tackle, among other things, ropes, nets and ladders.
Faust is a figure who cannot be satisfied. He is driven by a frenzied curiosity towards a sense of contentment that both attracts and repels him. He is a chameleon of a character who, by turns, is a knight and a civil engineer, and in one review was likened to enigmatic figures both real and fictional, from Howard Hughes to Peer Gynt and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
Faust’s three-month residency at the Lyric began in April 1988. Parts I and II ran on alternate nights of the week, but each Saturday brought a killer double bill. Simon Callow would begin each Part I as a 70-year-old Faust delivering a 40-minute speech, before being rejuvenated as a man in his mid-twenties, then coursing to the ripe old age of 120. He described the experience as like ‘climbing a mountain every day’, and explained to the New York Times that the complex personae of his role required him to overcome ‘an unbelievable series of hurdles’, from the plaintive despair of his opening soliloquy to the many shifts in voice, posture and attitude that made the ageing process of the part believable to an audience. ‘What I’m always striving for is a state of jazz, where things could always be different even when they’re not.’
Callow believed that, in order to tackle a multifaceted part like this, it was necessary to be ahead of the text and be at one with Faust’s thought processes of the character. Having painstakingly memorised his many lines, he felt it appropriate to half-forget them, so that he could retain some spontaneity for each performance, and remain receptive to whatever else was happening around him. ‘What characterises great actors is their ability to enter into the thought processes of the character,’ he said. It was the sort of commitment – investigating and researching a character – that Andy Serkis was already starting to appreciate.
The boldness of Faust was a partial response to an uncertain, worrying period for the Lyric. It had not been long since it had narrowly escaped closure. For its artistic director, Peter James, it was a throwing-down of the gauntlet. If the Lyric was to exist, it would be through taking a risk with something like Faust. ‘Everyone walked tall after that and thought, Two fingers to the world – we’ve done something good.’
It is striking how many similarities a production like Faust shares with a project like the Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy over a decade later: hard to realise convincingly as a spectacle, an epic length, a central complex character who requires great shifts of tone, and, perhaps above all else, a production that demanded that all involved should take risks. Reviewers for Faust did not call it flawless by any means, but most felt that it was well worth trying for the dazzling heights it did achieve, and despite any shortcomings that came about during the journey. Actors, directors, theatre companies, filmmakers – all must take risks from time to time.
Inspired by how investigating a character could make that character more real, Andy Serkis would reach greater heights on the London stage from the early 1990s. He aimed to explore method acting more and more, hoping to gain as much detail and authenticity as possible. But occasionally he was in danger of identifying too closely with a creation, and losing himself, for the sake of nailing a part. ‘I kind of nearly sent myself insane playing one role,’ he said much later. That role was of Dogboy, in Hush, a play by the British dramatist April de Angelis, which was staged at London’s Royal Court theatre in August and September 1992.
In Hush, Rosa (Dervla Kirwan) is trying to come to terms with her mother’s suicide the previous year, but discovers that she is pregnant after sleeping with a schizophrenic, homeless man on the beach. When the man finds that his dog has died, he suffers a breakdown, and in his anguish absorbs the canine’s spirit. He comes to be known as Dogboy, and shows up at Rosa’s family home on all-fours, naked and caked in mud, a creature summed up by a critic in The Stage as ‘a sort of modern refugee from the cruel world of King Lear’. His invasion of Rosa’s family home has a major effect on their relatively comfortable existence.
As the despairing Dogboy, Serkis does not utter a decipherable word. His way of communicating is through barks, yelps and growls, and he is symptomatic of all that cannot be contained or tamed. ‘We are not supposed to like or dislike him,’ observed the Independent on Sunday. ‘That is who he is.’ Dogboy acts as an uncomfortable reminder about those on the outside of society, and their often desperate need to be heard and helped. ‘What do you do about people who don’t quite fit?’ asked the Financial Times critic. ‘Throw them out, try to be nice to them, or send them to the social security?’
The critics were unanimous that Andy Serkis had excelled himself in the most courageous way as Dogboy, prepared to be naked and primal on stage for two and a half hours. Many years later, Serkis singled out Hush as the best possible preparation for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, who also spent countless hours crouched on all-fours. Dogboy prepared him for the challenge of embodying someone with such extreme physical and psychological behaviour.
In order to understand the character of Dogboy and his motivations, though, Serkis spent several weeks living rough on the streets. It was an early example of the lengths he would go to in order to be as true as possible to a role. He would become near-evangelical about his belief in acting, in how he regarded it as his chosen path in life, and the closest thing he had to a religious belief. He had long ago renounced the Catholicism of his childhood. ‘Once you become an actor, you can’t adhere to these things,’ he told The Times in 2006. ‘Acting doesn’t allow for absolutism. The questions you’re asked are too big to adhere to one belief system, and, whether that weakens you or not, I don’t know. I suppose sometimes I do wish I had the resolve of one belief system as a guiding measure.’
The totality of Serkis’s commitment – which he described as ‘an all-consuming quest’ – reached some kind of limitation during his preparation to become Dogboy. ‘I found that a hard role to shake off,’ he said in 2008 to the Sunday Telegraph. ‘It really messed with my head.’ Exploring Dogboy would, inevitably, become harrowing and dispiriting in an almost uncontrollable and even unhealthy way, ‘just getting deeply depressed about the hopelessness of the character and the world he lived in. I suppose I got consumed by the role, but they do always affect me. Can’t not.’ That sort of extreme research would be diluted once family life intervened during Serkis’s thirties. ‘It does alter drastically when you have children because you have to come home as a sane human being.’
After the hard-won triumph of Hush, Andy Serkis became a regular attraction in Royal Court offerings. A radical and irreverent adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, with Tom Wilkinson in the title role, opened there in January 1993. This version of Lear was set in the Edwardian era, where the Fool (Serkis) is portrayed as a transvestite, wearing a satin frock, bouffant hair-do (later removed to reveal a shaven head) and a padded bra. The reasoning behind this was to show that, with no sign of a queen in the play, the king is unable to relate to real women and so must confide in the comic jester figure of the Fool.
The sight of a Fool in drag, flitting from falsetto to no-nonsense south London gruffness, and strumming a ukulele to accompany his own original compositions, was a reworking too far for some pundits.