Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
looking like Charley’s Aunt (Daily Express), and resembling ‘something between Dame Hilda Bracket and a tougher, punked-up Julian Clary’ (Independent). The last of these critics was at least an admiring one, arguing that this Fool-ish portrayal was less about lazy shock tactics than a comment about Lear’s misogyny and distrust of women in general.
The decision to play the Fool as a Victorian music-hall drag artist (the closest thing to womanhood in Lear’s eyes) was, indeed, carefully considered by Serkis and director Max Stafford-Clark during rehearsals. Serkis carried out thorough research into music-hall turns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining their respective performing styles. ‘I sort of created my own act, if you like, and then brought that back into the play.’ He also penned some songs – for voice and ukulele – inspired by the period’s music-hall oeuvre, and which were garnished with Shakespeare’s original words. However, while the original play does not record the fate of the Fool (he simply disappears around two-thirds of the way through), in this production, Serkis’s incarnation of him is shown to be the victim of a hanging.
Assisted by some television exposure (see Chapter 4), by the early 1990s Serkis’s stage roles, in both London and the provinces, had been steadily growing in stature, from incidental to supporting – and to starring ones. And critics on national papers were starting to take notice of him. Take, for instance, his contribution to the musical comedy Sugar, staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds at Christmas 1990. Some performers might have been tempted, if appearing in a musical comedy based on the screenplay of Some Like it Hot, simply to watch Billy Wilder’s classic film and do little more than mimic the relevant actor. To the relief of the Observer’s Michael Coveney, Andy Serkis had not just copied Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne. ‘Serkis does not attempt to squeeze out Lemmon,’ he wrote early in January 1991, ‘but recycles him to match his own juice. This is a wise and cunning ploy. He respects the audience’s memory of the film while asserting his own right to bounce off it.’
Since Coveney’s appraisal, Serkis has been praised on many other occasions for how he has breathed new life into an established character from a much-revered text, be it Shakespeare, Dickens or Tolkien. How did he manage to do that, time and again? He did not watch other actors playing that part. ‘If I’m going to do something that’s been done before, I won’t watch that actor’s performance,’ he told American reporter Paula Nechak in 2004. ‘I’d end up being influenced. I’d feel disempowered, so I try and stay away from other people’s ideas.’
What doubtless kept Serkis’s mind fresh during the 1990s was a range of stage projects as broad as those he had been assigned in student drama and repertory theatre days in Lancaster. Drawing on his growing lexicon of imaginative acting techniques and styles, he was every bit as likely to commit to a new play as a classic.
He certainly excelled in Punchbag, a newly written comic play for 1993 by Red Dwarf’s Robert Llewellyn. It was set in a self-defence class for women, and Serkis donned padded armour to play Peter, a tortured soul whose function is to withstand assaults from members of the class, only to wind up smitten with one of his attackers. On one level, Peter looked absurd, ‘like a Gladiator crossed with a Transformer toy’ in the words of London’s Evening Standard. Then again, his marvellous portrayal of sexual frustration and torment for what he was being denied moved the Guardian’s Michael Billington to describe him as ‘a frog-eyed bundle of unfulfilled lust’. It was not the last time that Serkis would have to be in tip-top physical form, or tackle someone consumed by their own envy and self-disgust.
Plenty of acclaim, then, when it came to singling out Andy Serkis in individual productions. And yet, while each of these had its critical supporters, each had its detractors, too. What will help any performer’s reputation, though, is a play or film that is unanimously hailed as a contemporary classic, and, during one summer in the mid-1990s, one such play hit the London stage with considerable force. It also was one of the defining plays of its time, which placed the importance of the ensemble cast above any of its individual players.
Mojo, the first play to be written by 26-year-old Jez Butterworth, was a black comedy – sparky, tense and threatening. Its critical reception was such that it packed out the Royal Court night after night during the scorching summer of 1995. ‘That was just a buzz,’ remembered Serkis of the sensation it caused, ‘going out and playing in front of full houses, knowing that the audience was getting it.’
The play is set in a club in late 1950s Soho. The owner of Ezra’s Atlantic club in Dean Street faces a bid from one of his mobster rivals for the headlining act, teenage rock’n’roller Silver Johnny (Hans Matheson). It is not long before Silver Johnny is abducted and his owner is attacked, and then his son, manager and entourage await a further call. With lots of fast, bragging dialogue competing for space among all the cast, Serkis (as Potts) was half of a wisecracking, frequently amusing, sharp-suited double-act with Matt Bardock (as Sweets). Their vaudevillian bantering was just part of an orchestra of voices, each fighting to make itself heard – the sort of lively, noisy barrage of talking that requires careful attention from any audience.
What Butterworth and Mojo seemed to achieve, with extraordinary self-assurance, was to refresh and overhaul the stale and overcrowded genre of east London gangster drama. ‘A comedy with the psychotic pace of an Alexei Sayle sketch but the verbal precision of Beckett,’ commented the Mail on Sunday’s admiring critic. With a cast also featuring Tom Hollander and Aiden Gillen, Mojo would win several awards, including the 1995 George Devine Award, and led to the funding and shooting of a cinematic version, which also involved Serkis, and which we’ll come to in Chapter 5.
Serkis regarded Mojo as a highlight of his stage career. Another credit he remains particularly proud of is Hurlyburly by the American playwright David Rabe. It was written in 1984, and the cast of its Broadway run had included Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt and – a long time before Sex and the City made her a worldwide star – Cynthia Nixon. But it also took 13 years for Hurlyburly to be staged on British soil.
As well as Serkis, the cast over the two London runs included future James Bond Daniel Craig, Kelly Macdonald (who had made a remarkable big-screen debut in Trainspotting the previous year), Mark Benton, Jenny Seagrove and a young David Tennant. The play is a study of a group of cynical figures in Hollywood culture. All are rootless beings. Serkis played Phil, a troubled ex-con with a seething contempt for the opposite sex. Phil yearns for a big movie break, and badgers an amoral, unscrupulous casting director called Eddie (Rupert Graves), but he cannot control his short fuse and unpredictable, explosive rages. Critics such as the Guardian’s Michael Billington were struck by Serkis’s ‘terrifying sense of uncertainty that manifests itself in acts of random violence. You quiver with apprehension when he holds his baby in his arms.’
Serkis was inspired by Hurlyburly’s American-born director, Wilson Milam, to feel free onstage, and to feel relaxed with the part’s intensity. It was impossible to phone in a character like Phil. ‘Phil was just a dream part, really. Every performance felt like an improvisation.’ Not least the opening night. Shortly after 10pm on 24 March 1997, the announcement of a bomb scare meant that everyone at the Old Vic theatre in south London had to be evacuated from the building. So the maiden night of the run climaxed in a small park opposite the venue, with the cast forced to raise their voices above the heckling of the nearby road traffic. There was an implicit understanding that this was an unusual but spontaneous performance of the play, and, when one actor momentarily forgot their next line, an audience member handed them a copy of the script.
Responding to new challenges all the time had become second nature to Andy Serkis. Over many years of stage work, it was rare for him to spend longer than a three-month spell in a stage play, which lengthened the odds on his performing on autopilot. In any case, he recognised that the way to maintain an interest in a role is to address and appreciate the audience. For Serkis, a theatrical audience is forever unpredictable. ‘I never see them as passive,’ he said. ‘They’re a living, breathing organism.’ Nor was an audience a single entity, but a cluster of individuals, all with their own unique personalities. ‘As a young actor, you tend to judge them as a mass. “Oh,