Spamalot, the sublimely silly Monty Python musical, begins with a false start.
Only once the mystifying Finnish Fisch Schlapping dance troupe has been
ushered off does the audience hear the familiar rhythmic clopping of coconut
shells. They herald the arrival — not on horseback — of King Arthur. He
trots on from the wings sporting a crown, a suit of chain mail and the proud
grin of a man who has no idea there is nothing between his legs. Of the
Pythons’ sight gags, the horseless horseman was always the best.
When Eric Idle’s Tony-winning hit arrives on these shores, King Arthur’s smile
will be even broader. “I had that big, insane grin on my face,” says Tim
Curry, who alone of the original cast will reprise the role he played in New
York, “because I was so happy to be part of it. Mike Nichols (the director)
said, ‘Once we’ve got the thing started, we’d love you to go and open it
wherever you want to.’ I said, ‘Nobody has ever said that to me before, and
I would love to do it in London.’ It’s a wonderful way to come home”.
It has taken a while. Although he has been looking for vehicles in which to
recross the Atlantic, Curry’s prodigal return has been so endlessly deferred
that a whole generation of theatre-goers will have no idea who he is unless
they happen to have seen his star turn as the fishnetted Dr Frank-N-Furter
in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film made three decades ago, in the same
year as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “Which, of course, they have,” he
says. “I’m reintroduced to a different raft of kids on an annual basis. I’ve
always been grateful for that.”
Curry is now 60. Thanks to the continuing cult of a play-turned-movie via
which generation after generation of students has got in touch with their
gender-bending side, he remains a bona fide star. Yet when he made his
previous stage appearance in this country — at the National in 1986, in
Dalliance, Tom Stoppard’s translation of Schnitzler’s Liebelei — he was 40.
The intervening decades have been spent in comfortable exile, only
half-heartedly pursuing the grail of screen stardom. At no point has Curry
ever cracked Hollywood in the conventional sense. Having lent his voice to a
huge number of cartoons, including The Wild Thornberrys, Rugrats and
numerous spin-offs of a Disney series called Mighty Ducks, you could say he
has quacked it. In big-budget film, the years in the sun have yielded
usually villainous cameos, in The Hunt for Red October, Charlie’s Angels,
Scary Movie 2 and Home Alone 2.
The truth is that while Rocky Horror was a perfect shop window for Curry’s
maverick talent, movie casting directors have small imaginations, and there
never were many calls for antic transsexual types. Consequently, he never
got close to being a name that could open a film, apart from maybe Muppet
Treasure Island. “I wouldn’t dispute that,” he says. “Probably the closest
was Clue. It died a death and made a fortune on video. But I think you can
quite confidently put me above the marquee in a theatre still.”
Five years ago, that is just what they finally did at Radio City Music Hall in
New York.
Susan Stroman, who went on to direct The Producers, cast Curry as Scrooge in a
musical version of A Christmas Carol. “The theatre there has 5,000 seats,
and I was dreading it. But I remember going out on stage at the beginning of
the technical rehearsals and thinking, ‘You idiot, this is what you do.’”
In short, it was easier to cross over from cross-dressing on stage than on
film. He still didn’t hold his breath when Idle, whom he had befriended in
LA, told him he would be a shoo-in for a Python musical he was writing. Idle
had already dangled the prospect of a part in a Merchant Ivory spoof called
The Remains of the Piano, until the money fell through. “You hear those
things and you think, ‘How wonderful’. I’ve learnt to just let people take
their time and do their thing.” Even when Curry was summoned to New York for
a reading of Spamalot in front of Nichols, he knew “it was basically an
audition”. Fortunately, he passed, which is why, two years on, he is sitting
in the Savoy after rehearsals, drinking black coffee and wearing the
traditional actors’ fatigues of blazer and trackie bottoms.
This is not Curry’s first homecoming, or even his second. In 1974, he
travelled to America with the touring production of The Rocky Horror Show.
“I went from a bedsit behind Baker Street to Jack Nicholson’s pool in the
space of three or four weeks.”
But the show flopped in New York, and he was relieved to accept a job playing
Jerome K Jerome on the BBC back home.
A couple of years later, he was lured to America again, this time by A&M’s
offer of a record deal. There were three albums, one of covers, though the
next two included his own songs. “It wasn’t a very smart career decision,
but it was what I wanted to do,” he says now. “In terms of any kind of
classic career trajectory, I’ve spread myself too thin. But I’ve done what
interested me at the time.”
Theatre continued to interest him, and in the same year as his final album, he
made a dazzling return to centre stage when Peter Hall cast him as Mozart in
the Broadway transfer of Amadeus. He remembers being asked by a journalist
if Rocky Horror had typecast him. “I said, ‘Well, look at me. I’m playing an
18th-century genius in a wig. What do you think?’” He lost out at the 1981
Tonys to his co-star Ian McKellen. He says he had “a Damascus moment when
Ian and I spent New Year’s Eve with Jane Lapotaire and Zoë Wanamaker, who
were doing Piaf next door. I found myself defending Ronald Reagan and I
thought, ‘You’ve been here too long.’”
This time he stayed home for longer. He starred in several plays in Hall’s
final years as artistic director at the National. Apart from a sparkling
production of The Rivals, he doesn’t have fond memories of the time. It was
on his accountant’s recommendation that he returned to America to star in
the Me and My Girl tour. “It did make me think, ‘Actually what I want to do
is stay in California and work for cameras.’ I thought I’d better do it
while I was still young enough. And I’m not good at English winters. I have
that seasonal affective thing. I used to live on the river at Fulham, and in
February you’d look out and the river and sky were the same impenetrable
grey, and it was just a question of which rusty razor blade to use and which
vein to open.”
The sniffiness of English colleagues helped to persuade him to stay away.
“Having spent so much time in America, I was saying ‘elevator’, and English
actors would say, ‘Oh, elevator?’ There was a kind of tall-poppy syndrome I
found quite painful — until I saw them trudging down Wilshire Boulevard six
months later, desperately trying to get into a soap.”
Curry was born in Cheshire and brought up in the West Country, where his
father, a Methodist chaplain in the navy, was mostly stationed. For four
years they lived in Plymouth, and he remembers “picking my way over the bomb
sites to school”. His father died when he was 12, so it was left to his
mother to disapprove of his career choice. Like all post-war mums, she
expected him to enter one of the professions, so made sure he studied drama
at university rather than acting at drama college. He plumped for Birmingham
and did more plays than work. “She always had this curious idea that I was
going to get some terrible big head. In that awful war of attrition when
you’re in and out of hospital before you die, she would have a picture of me
on the bedside table, because I think it was probably jolly useful for the
nurses. But when I showed up, it was in the drawer. I didn’t know it was
there.” Dr Frank-N-Furter, he notes, “was in large part a portrait of her.
So she lives on”.
He first met Richard O’Brien, the creator of Rocky Horror, in the cast of Hair
in 1968. Over the years, he has had what he calls “frissons”
with O’Brien. “One of the things I terribly regret that he doesn’t
understand is that I’ve never, ever given an interview about Rocky Horror
where I didn’t say, ‘You’re talking to the wrong person. Please remember who
wrote every single note and every single word and imagined this whole
extraordinary grab bag of the zeitgeist of 1973.’ But they never print that,
so Richard doesn’t know.”
As he feels his way back into British theatre after all these years, Curry is
starting to think the unthinkable. “One of the reasons I’m glad to be back
in London is it gives me a chance to think about whether I’d like to live
here again.” You would love to see his Falstaff at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Unwittingly, a cast of compatriots in the Spamalot rehearsal room is helping
him make up his mind.
“I do miss the British sense of humour. It’s so much fun now, doing it with an
English cast who, of course, take to it like ducks to water. The American
cast loved it and worshipped at its shrine.
But I always think there’s a slight sense of ticking off the jokes. American
actors always talk about nailing things. ‘Boy, you really nailed that joke.’
It’s not that English actors aren’t in hot pursuit of every joke, but they
have a naturally lazier delivery. Which I’m appreciating.”
Spamalot previews from September 30 at the Palace, W1
