The Cheshire Cat had his grin, David Haig has his moustache. The 53-year-old
actor with his famously neat whiskers looks as if he was born to play
Inspector Truscott in the latest revival of Joe Orton’s Loot.
Leonard Rossiter and Michael Bates sported formidable dead slugs on their
upper lips in the role, as did Richard Attenborough in the film version.
Of course, Haig has the requisite talent, as well as facial hair that enters
the room before he does. It is easy to imagine him as the explosively
volatile corrupt copper who arrives at the house where the young thieves Hal
(Matt Di Angelo of EastEnders) and Dennis (Javone Prince) have
stashed the cash from a recent robbery. As the inspector calls, the money is
secreted, in typically anarchic Ortonish fashion, in the coffin of Hal’s
dead mum while the corpse is jammed into a wardrobe.
Truscott is a part Haig has admired for years. Removing his red-checked winter
jacket and relaxing in the office of the Tricycle Theatre in North London,
he is friendly and mustard-keen as he explains that he feels as if he has
almost played it already in the sitcom The Thin Blue Line. “I must
ask Ben Elton this, but I’ve always wondered if he based my Inspector Grim
to an extent on some subliminal memory of Truscott. I reread Loot after
doing Grim and thought wouldn’t it be nice to play him onstage.”
There are vital differences, though. Grim was a simple buffoon, there is a
vicious streak to the bribe-taking Truscott. Haig leans forward in his chair
and concurs. “One of the fascinating things about the play is that some of
the issues may no longer shock, but there is an amorality and greed to the
play that is as shocking as ever and it should be played to the hilt,
otherwise it becomes just another farce.”
Loot has a colourful history. The first run, starring a miscast Kenneth
Williams as Truscott, flopped and it was only after substantial rewrites
that it gathered momentum, awards and notoriety. In the hit 1966 production,
with Michael Bates as Truscott, Orton mischievously put his recently
deceased mum’s teeth in the fake corpse’s mouth. A year later Orton himself
was dead, his head smashed in by his lover Kenneth Halliwell.
Revivals have also been notable. In 1984 Paul McGann accidentally dropped the
corpse into the stalls on the opening night at the Ambassadors Theatre.
Leonard Rossiter, an acclaimed Truscott, died suddenly of heart disease in
his dressing room after it had transferred to the Lyric.
By coincidence, another Orton play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, is about to
be revived at the Trafalgar Studios, starring Mathew Horne from Gavin &
Stacey. Maybe, in the weird world of Little Britain and
Ross/Brand, where comedy is saying the unsayable again, these plays tap into
the Zeitgeist. The downside is that they may not shock as much as in
the Sixties when, Haig says, “a large percentage of the audience was sitting
open-mouthed”.
Loot can still cause discomfort, he insists. “We are very used to dark
comedy now, but Truscott beats the s**t out of two kids, and one in this
production is black. He says, ‘I will do whatever needs to be done to get my
conviction’ and if it entails violence that’s fine. He’s corrupt in every
sense. At one point Truscott says he is going to investigate the least
important of the crimes first, which is murder, while the most important is
stealing public money, which feels very contemporary with what is going on
with the banks at the moment.”
This is a rare chance to see Haig hit out. Usually he is a master of repressed
rage. He constantly seems to be on the cusp of exploding, whether as the
cuckold Pinchwife in The Country Wife or as Inspector Grim. He is so
good at it, is he drawing on his home life in South London, with his
actor-cum-professional cook wife, Jane Galloway, and their five children,
ranging from nine to 23? “I don’t think my children take my rage that
seriously and I don’t think other characters take it seriously, either.
That’s the trick, to get that angry with no ultimate danger.” If you want
impotent exasperation, Haig is your man. “I’m very rarely laid-back. I do
recognise the neurotic fever in myself.”
Loot also has a whiff of sex about it, with the young crooks being
lovers as well as criminal bedfellows. Haig keeps his macintosh on, but sex
seems to be a motif in his CV. He came to prominence in 1994 as Bernard in Four
Weddings and a Funeral, who indulges in a spot of postnuptial nookie
while Hugh Grant hides in a bedroom wardrobe.
For me, though, another Haig sex scene lodges in the mind. In 1994 he starred
in Dead Funny, Terry Johnson’s meditation on love and death, opposite
Zoë Wanamaker. The play included a memorable moment with Wanamaker in a
basque and Haig in nothing at all. At the time I interviewed Johnson and
asked him a troubling question. How come David Haig didn’t get an erection?
Johnson told me to ask Haig himself. Fourteen years later I had my chance.
“I think it’s impossible to get an erection on stage – though you’ll now get
e-mails from all the actors who have got erections on stage – but as far as
I’m concerned you just feel cold sexually. Don’t misunderstand me Zoë, I
never felt cold to you, but for me there was never any danger of that
happening.” In the nicest possible sense it became workmanlike. “I was doing
it every night in the same old faithful position. There was not even any
variety.”
There is certainly variety in Haig’s output. He could stake a convincing claim
to being England’s hardest working stage actor, in the past five years
having juggled different but equally scintillating permutations of comic,
tweedy, straight and manic in The Sea, The Country Wife, Donkey’s
Years, Journey’s End, Mary Poppins and Hitchcock Blonde.
And somehow he also finds time for television. He is in a Jacqueline Wilson
drama, Dustbin Kid, and a remake of The 39 Steps this
Christmas. He also wrote and starred in the First World War drama, My Boy
Jack, on stage and on television. For Haig it is not a question of how
does he do it, but why: “Five kids, that’s why.”
This strong work ethic was not always there. Hard to imagine now, but Haig was
your archetypal drop-out. He was expelled from Rugby School for minor
misdemeanours and in 1973, aged 18, all hippy hair and wispy moustache,
ended up on a kibbutz. “I met a Danish girl and lived in Denmark for two
years, making fibreglass toilets, shovelling grain into sacks. I was a
hospital porter and did a drainage course. On one occasion we had a lecture
from a man from K Drains in Canterbury who said, ‘You are really studying in
the wrong country, come and work for me’, not realising my motives.”
Haig returned to the UK, not to work for K Drains but to study at Lamda and
his career slowly but surely took off. He singles out his performance in Tom
and Viv in 1985 as the turning point. He certainly seems to be going
through a golden period now, but then he’s been going through a golden
period for more than 20 years. Like all actors, he oozes insecurity. “It’s
certainly been good but I’m still broke. Every time I think I’m established
I think my comeuppance is round the corner.” Looking on the bright side,
he’d be happy to be less busy. “I’m hoping I might work less in 2009.” Some
hope.
Loot, Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (www.tricycle.co.uk
020-7328 1000), until Jan 31 2009
