Sylvester McCoy is perched beside the Tron Theatre bar at the end of
the day's rehearsals for J.C. Marshall's new play, Plume, in which he
plays a man grieving for his son killed in a terrorist attack twenty
years before. As McCoy sips on a gin, fellow cast member Finn Den
Hertog is expounding on something which appears small from the outside,
but once inside is infinitely more expansive.
“Now, where have I heard that before?” deadpans McCoy before picking up
his gin and his walking stick en route to the theatre's boardroom,
which for some reason has had it's full-length table removed. The
effect, while no TARDIS, makes its space too seem far larger than it
actually is. McCoy's wry little in-joke may refer to how a certain
generation of science-fiction geeks know him best for his 1980s stint
as Dr Who, but as his role in Plume proves, there's been a working life
since playing the iconic Timelord, and there was certainly one before
it.
While he's just spent the best part of two years in New Zealand filming
Peter Jackson's latest big-screen Tolkien adaptation, The Hobbit,
McCoy's earliest screen appearance was on deaf children's educational
show, Vision On, before graduating to Jigsaw and TISWAS. In the midst
of all this, the artist formerly known as Percy James Patrick
Kent-Smith was putting ferrets down his trousers alongside the likes of
Bob Hoskins in anarchic 1970s fringe theatre troupe, The Ken Campbell
Roadshow.
“Some people are maybe a bit surprised when they see me in something
like this play,” he says. “In (TV sit-com) Still Game I played a rather
sad character, who comes out after forty years of locking himself away
in his tenement, sees the new Glasgow and decides he doesn't like it so
goes back in and locks the door again. Then in Rab C Nesbitt I played
Rab's lunatic brother who escapes from the asylum, and again that was
quite a tragic character. Most of the other work I've done isn't like
that. Not in England, anyway, where they don't seem to see me like
that, but in Scotland it's different. I didn't get cast up here at all
for a long time, and then I played a character on TV called Angus, and
that's when people up here realised I was a Scot.”
At Edinburgh International Festival, McCoy actually played Scotland in
John McGrath's late period spectacle, A Satire of the Four Estates.
Also at EIF, he appeared in Jo Clifford's version of Calderon's Life is
A Dream, and in The Hypochondriack at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre.
More recently, McCoy appeared in post Still Game's cornershop-set BBC
Radio 4 Sanjeev Kohli vehicle, Fags, Mags and Bags. Plume is something
else again.
“It's a beautifully written play,” McCoy says, “about loss and sadness,
and the change in a human being because of that loss. The man I play is
a retired teacher, who's widowed, and his son being blown up in a
plane affects and changes him from being a lovable, nice, kind caring
human being into an angry person.”
Told in a series of flashbacks depicting the man's relationship wityh
his son, while the act of terrorism that so dramatically changes
McCoy's character clearly derives from the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, it
remains very much in the background.
“Lockerbie is there,” says McCoy, “but it's not principal to the story.
It's not a political play in that way, but there's the final straw that
releases all this anger in him. One of the reasons for me wanting to do
it was that I've got sons, and when I was reading it, I thought, well,
how would I feel if that happened to me. I was touched.”
Audiences may well have presumed McCoy to be touched in another way
during his early days, when he flitted between risking life and limb in
Roadshow outings such as the self-explanatory An Evening With Sylveste
McCoy The Human Bomb while becoming a kids TV regular.
“TV was very insular in those days, “ McCoy remembers, “and they didn't
know much about theatre. But I was very lucky, because we'd become a
bit of a cult by then, and Clive Doig, who did Vision On and created
Jigsaw, had heard about this crazy guy exploding bombs in the Royal
Court, and came to see me.”
Fortunately for McCoy, Vision On was a mime artist down, and he got the
the gig. His double act with the late David Rappaport on the Janet
Ellis-fronted Jigsaw as The O-Men tapped into the same sense of ad hoc
anarchy that fuelled his work with Campbell, and it's easy in
retrospect to see the influences of Buster Keaton, Max Wall, Stan
Laurel and Alec Guinness, all of whom McCoy describes as his “gods.”
Having a foot in such seemingly different camps also goes some way to
explaining the peculiar post-1960s relationship between children's TV
and the equally childlike first wave of British alternative theatre
that was quietly subverting young minds while mum and dad were looking
the other way.
“I loved that schizophrenic existence,” he says.
If things had worked out differently, McCoy could have been expounding
another god after growing up an orphan, a factor he considers a crucial
influence on how things turned out.
“Children who are brought up by their parents get their love by right,
whereas if you're an orphan, you feel like you've got to earn it, so
you try and be noticed more.”
McCoy trained as a priest, “for a dare, and I loved every minute of it.
I decided I wanted to be a Dominican monk, and really got into it.
Method acting at it's best. But I was a year too young, so was sent to
a mixed school, and instead of wearing a skirt, I started chasing it.”
McCoy got a job in the City, where found himself drawn to swinging
London's burgeoning scene based around the counter-culture's unofficial
HQ, The Roundhouse.
“They needed a hippy who could count,” McCoy says, “so I ended up
working in the box office.”
McCoy was recommended to Campbell by actor Brian Murphy, who he'd
improvise little scenes with around the box office. McCoy would run
into Murphy again at the Theatre Royal Stratford a few years later,
when legendary director Joan Littlewood hired him for a production of
Brendan Behan's The Hostage after picking him up busking outside the
theatre.
“I didn't know there were rules,” McCoy says now. “I only knew our
rules, which was to grab that audience and shake them up. I was coming
from a whole new energy and madness that was going on in fringe
theatre, and at the time it freaked the others out. One of them even
wrote to Equity to complain about me.”
He and Leonard Fenton later made up, and ended up playing Beckett
together.
McCoy's turn as The Fool in King Lear captured both sides of the comic
pathos he's so adept at. It's fitting too that Lear was played by Sir
Ian McKellan, who played Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. This connection
led to an invitation from Jackson on the New Zealand leg of the tour.
Having narrowly missed out on Lord of the Rings, McCoy was succesful
second time round, and after Plume returns to New Zealand to resume
filming.
Beyond The Hobbit, McCoy expresses a desire to play Malvolio.
“He's funny,” McCoy says, “but he's only funny because people laugh at
him and not with him. He's kind of tragic and tortured, and they're the
parts I seem to do best.”
Plume, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, March 1-17
www.tron.co.uk
The Herald, February 28th 2012
ends
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