FESTIVAL FEATURES | Comedians Writing Plays
L-R: Kim Noble’s You’re Not Alone, Suki Webster’s My Obsession, Richard Herring’s I Killed Rasputin, Mark Thomas’ Cuckooed. Previous page: Russell Kane’s The Closure of Craig Solly
‘It’s harder if you’re a stand-up to do a play. It’s
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Porter explains. ‘They fell at the hurdle of domesticity and marriage like so many women do. They published a manifesto that outlined their rules and constitution, and it’s heartbreaking because they say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a society where women were valued as much for their minds as their bodies?” And yeah, 300 years later, wouldn’t it still be nice?’ Porter’s play is a i ctionalised account of these young women, and fans of her stand-up will certainly detect the inl uence of her comedy background – though it has posed some dangers. ‘I’m used to writing for my own voice,’ she says, ‘and I couldn’t help but identify more strongly with one of the characters in this play. So the danger there is that I’ve written a stand-up show for one of them. When I’m writing stand-up, I tend to wander off on massive tangents and I could feel my signature wafl y style creeping into this too, so it’s been good discipline to stop doing that.’
In Suki Webster’s My Obsession, she plays a superfan who meets her idol, a comedian played by fellow Impro Chum and husband, Paul Merton. And she’s found her improv background an unexpected boost to her playwriting skills.
‘Interestingly,’ she explains, ‘I wrote the play by imagining myself improvising it on stage with different people, normally the Impro Chums. At the beginning, I imagined I was on stage with Mike McShane, and then I imagined I was on stage with Lee Simpson, and then with Paul. In my head, I improvised it out with me playing one character, and then I improvised it out with me playing the other character. Because
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otherwise you always give the character you’re playing in your head the best lines.’ Herring’s play, I Killed Rasputin, is about Felix Yusupov, a Russian aristocrat who was involved in the murder of the Mad Monk. ‘I’ve always been obsessed with Rasputin,’ he says. ‘One of my i rst Edinburgh shows was called Ra-Ra-Rasputin, which was based on the life of Rasputin as if he’d written Boney M’s hits and was a pop star.’ And even though he’s continued to write scripts and TV shows in the 15 years since his last Fringe play, Herring has not found the process easy. ‘With a stand-up gig,’ he explains, ‘I’ll do 40 previews and by the end of that I’ll have a show – you work it out via audience feedback over those 40 nights so it’s a much easier process. It’s just you telling stories, whereas with plays you have to think of a story arc. With a play like this, it’s about trying to make sure you put across all this information that people might not know about what was happening in Tsarist Russia in 1917, without just going “And then what happened was . . . ” There’s a lot more subtlety to it. It’s really good fun – it’s just really hard.’
Among I Killed Rasputin’s six-strong cast are Justin Edwards (star of The Thick of It and Porter’s husband) and Surgical Spirit’s Nichola McAuliffe, who also directs Russell Kane’s monologue, The Closure of Craig Solly. Like Herring, Kane found the process of writing a play harder than the writing he’s done before. ‘The i rst stage of it went so badly that I wanted to pull the play from the run,’ Kane admits, ‘but it was too late. Without meaning to sound cocky, I’ve done second, third,