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The boys from the black stuff The inhabitants of Royston Vasey the deranged, the perverted and the inbred are coming to London. Andrew Martin meets The League of Gentlemen, masters of the darkest comedy 8 March 2001 Judging by the way they packed out the cavernous Brighton Centre at a show I attended last week, the members of the The League of Gentlemen have managed to parlay their obsession with creepy eccentrics into a mass phenomenon. They are currently on a tour that has been extended several times on the strength of its huge success, and press releases from their PR people on the subject of their forthcoming dates at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane their first-ever West End appearance – tend to feature hand-scribbled alterations as the projected run gets ever longer. But for anyone who doesn't know the work of this maverick troupe, here's the story so far. The League are four men in their mid-thirties of whom three, Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith, are performers, and one, Jeremy Dyson, is a writer only. They won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1997 for a series of unusually dark sketches. A Radio 4 series came next, in which they placed the weirdos they'd created in the sketches in a town called Spent, but they decided this name was "too word play-ish" so, for their multi-award winning BBC TV series of 1999 and 2000, the location was re-christened Royston Vasey, which is actually the real name of the comedian Roy Chubby Brown – who is often to be found effing and blinding at the end of a northern pier in summer. (He's apparently taken the whole thing very well). Royston Vasey is evoked on TV by filming in and about the small Derbyshire town of Hadfield, which is set among rolling hills. "We had to have the hills," Steve Pemberton told me, "because then it looks as though you can't get out of the place." Royston Vasey looks like The Last of the Summer Wine inverted: a beautiful landscape and old stone buildings yet peopled, not by cute, amiable folk but by freaks and sadists. There's Pauline Campbell Jones, the council restart officer, a municipal gorgon, tyrannical in her dispensation of pens. Among her job-seekers is Mickey, an actually quite sweet-natured moron with lovingly detailed acne, the Eccles of Royston Vasey. There's Tubbs, a snouty woman with lagged legs and a maggoty body, and her porcine, blazered husband, Edward. They're proprietors of a "local shop for local people", who speak a fragmented, inbred language and murder all strangers. The town butcher furtively sells "special stuff" – by implication, human meat. There's an anally retentive toad-fancier who will not have solids passed in his downstairs toilet. And oddest of all is a spring-heeled, blacked-up refugee from some ramshackle, time-warped carnival: Papa Lazarou. The League are not quite unique. Harry Enfield and Reeves and Mortimer share their interest in cheesey Seventies interiors, rustic retards, and general grotesquerie. These others are also more reliably funny than the League, whose humour can be a bit gallumphing, incorporating stark profanities, puns, funny songs, catchphrases, slapstick and anything to hand, really. But what sets the League apart is the harrowing intensity of the performance. Their current live show, A Local Show For Local People, is not at all like Reeves and Mortimer gigs, which are free-wheeling, with much corpsing and many asides. The League get so deeply into their characters that, underneath the make-up and costume changes, you often can't tell who's playing who. The sketches in the live show – some new, some familiar from TV, others dating from their early fringe days – are often traumatic. Some end with people weeping, and most leave you feeling shaken and undermined. They often work on the level of straight drama or spectacle, and the jokes are like a bonus. After the Brighton show, I am taken backstage to meet Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. They are being congratulated by Neil Morrissey, 50 per cent of Men Behaving Badly, who is as ebullient and amusing off-screen, it seems, as on. The two Leaguers reply to his noisy blandishments meekly. "Oh, thanks," they say, "actually we were probably better in Sheffield." You have a sense that here are two technicians, rather than natural stars. In person, minus make-up and props, they seem incredibly small, normal and gauche. It's the Wizard of Oz syndrome. "We're not comedians at all," begins Reece, "we're actors." The League (apart from Jeremy Dyson) first came together at a Wakefield drama college called Bretton Hall that could almost have been one of the ingredients for Royston Vasey. "It's not actually in Wakefield," points out Steve Pemberton, "it's in the countryside just outside – in a sculpture park with all these Henry Moores in it. Before you go there you are warned that there's a danger of cabin fever." According to Reece, they wanted to bring their show into the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, "because it's a proper theatre, with a proscenium arch". They also like the fact that the Pythons once did a run there. They're steeped in showbiz lore, having spent all their childhoods unhealthily devoted to TV and films. Reece cites as influential "character actors like Alastair Sim and Leonard Rossiter, and films that pull the rug out from under your feet, like The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now". We talk about the overlap between horror and comedy, and the Leaguers are curious about ventriloquists' dummies. "Do the ventriloquists know they're grotesque?" asks Reece, "do they admit it?" Punch and Judy shows are mentioned. The League's character, Papa Lazarou, speaks in a metallic, grating voice as though, like Mr Punch, through a swozzle. But no firm conclusions are reached. The League are just glad that they have this territory to themselves – on this side of the Atlantic, at least. Their live show contains, alongside the horror, a few shafts of more conventional satire. One sketch concerns a gushing, mobile phone-addicted fag-hag from, of course, Camden ("it's almost our only sketch set in London", muses Steve). In another, the particularly well-observed Royston Vasey community theatre company, Legz Akimbo, perform a compressed parody of works from the it's-tough-up-north-school. "I hated The Full Monty," says Steve, "it's all chuffing this and blinking that." They resent any categorisation of their imaginations. "Whenever anyone writes about us," says Reece, "it's always 'four northern lads'." He shakes his head in disgust. Perhaps the League feel patronised. Reece is the son of a fish filleter from Hull; Steve is the son of a car salesman from Blackburn. Anyway, they're determined not to be professional northerners. The town used to represent Royston Vasey, they argue, just happens to be in the north, because that's where you find places with the right lonely, windswept feel. But if their subject is not the north, are they not condemning provincial life generally? If you tried summing up their shows in six words they might be: do not move out of London. But Steve says this reading would be wrong. "It was all quite accidental. We just had all these characters, and we thought we'd put them in a town." Well, next week the town of Royston Vasey comes to London, and anyone thinking of going should take note that, after I saw the show in Brighton, I felt seriously infected by the League's worldview. For days afterwards, the tiniest blemish on anyone's face seemed hugely magnified, the smallest eccentricities horripilatingly weird. It was the first time I'd felt that way since I came out of the David Lynch film Eraserhead. You have been warned. |
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