May
02, 2004
Comedy:
Take the magical misery tour
Acerbic
wit Dylan Moran is on the road, but, he tells Stephen Armstrong, writing is what
keeps his motor running
Dylan
Moran walks onto the stage of Reading’s vast Hexagon theatre to entertain the
Saturday-night crowd. All is concrete and echo, space and silence. The posters
in the foyer advertise huge touring spectacles, with bands and showgirls and
fading pop stars entertaining with lights and amps and explosions. In the
auditorium, Moran looks small, dishevelled and slightly bewildered as he gazes
up into the darkness. For a moment, you think he is going to falter and fail.
Then he begins. His withering, scornful gaze plays across all our petty
concerns, from health (he chain-smokes to such an extent that I swear he lights
one fag from another on at least three occasions) to God (“People who are
religious are basically people with imaginary friends”), and he actually manages
to warm the cold, dead room. By the end, Reading loves him.
In
the hotel bar after the gig, however, he isn’t feeling it. “Ideally, I’d like to
start the show at the level the second half reached and take it up from there.”
He speaks quietly as he sips his glass of merlot. “It’s difficult in these
soulless rooms. It’s like talking to people in a concourse at an airport. It’s
never going to feel like a conspiracy, which it should do. At the same time, you
can’t say it’s the room. You’ve got to figure a way in, whatever the problem.
That’s the job. It’s like being Donald Sutherland, having to get under the
bridge and blow it up with a match and a packet of butter.”
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Ah,
I think, the famous Moran grumpiness. From the age of 20, he has been earning
his keep by marketing disdain and contempt to crowds of grateful admirers. As a
stripling from Navan, Co Meath, he was inspired by Ardal O’Hanlon and took to
the stage. In 1996, aged 25, he won the Perrier Award as the misanthrope
personified. In 2000, Channel 4 loved his dream so much, they bought the series.
The result — Black Books, with Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig — saw Moran write
and star as the cantankerous Bernard Black, a Bloomsbury bookseller who prefers
red wine to people. The show has just finished its third and final series to a
chorus of pleas for more.
Moran
isn’t interested. “I think we’ve done it, and people enjoyed it, and that’s what
we were after. There’s a risk of undermining the whole enthusiasm we had at the
outset. So I’m pleased we got out intact.” Instead, he’s extending his acting,
appearing in this year’s Britflick success, Shaun of the Dead, with Simon Pegg,
and returning to the road for an extended stand-up tour. Deep down inside,
however, it’s the writing he loves. “With live performance, there’s so much
outside your control,” he explains the following morning over coffee and a pack
or two of cigarettes. “One night, something wonderful happens, and you don’t
entirely know why. What I’m finding now is that I want to control every factor,
and I can’t. So I’m inevitably becoming drawn to books. The one where you
control everything.”
He
reminds me of Richard Burton, an actor so talented that when he appeared as the
narrator in a London run of Under Milk Wood, he had to be placed in the wings to
stop the audience staring at him throughout. Even motionless, he mesmerised.
Moran has that. He can simply stand on stage and still get laughs. But Burton
had no regard for acting, perhaps because it came so effortlessly. He wanted to
be a writer, and he grew to despise his craft. Is that pit opening up for Moran?
Does he fail to value his talent?
“I
value it when the laughs are too far apart,” he snorts. “But, yes, the things
you can do easily, you have no respect for. The things you can’t do, you love.
You’ve seen it a hundred times. People go off and pursue that dream, and you
think: that is cosmic pants, what are you doing?”
So
what are you doing? He sighs and hunches forward over the tape machine. “What it
boils down to is this: are you going to spend the rest of your life doing 90
minutes about being a grumpy f***er? And I’m bored with that, essentially. I
want a solo project. Something I won’t be able to blame anybody else for if it
goes wrong. Anyway, it’s inevitable. I’m a comedian, of course I’m going to
write a f***ing novel. There are comedians being born and finding letters from
publishers waiting in the hospital.”
But
he’s so good at it, I plead, aware of the brown-nose whine to my voice. And he
has grown into the part so well. As a twentysomething, the crotchety persona sat
well on his shoulders, but seemed — like a borrowed overcoat — slightly
ill-fitting. At 32, with the struggles of child-rearing behind him, his cynical
world-view clings snugly, and we, the jaded, post-1990s British public, are more
than ready to hear it. Is this rejection of his oeuvre the price of success? Is
he suddenly (gasp) happy?
“Look,
that’s all just shtick, you know?” He looks at me with some concern. “I don’t
feel like that all the time. You wouldn’t be able to walk the streets. I still
find angry people funny because anger is so funny. It’s so futile and
irresistible and self-defeating. It’s desire times 10, with built-in
self-destruction that will push whatever is desired further away, and that’s
hilarious to me. It’s not the done thing, is it, to fold like a deckchair, hold
your head in your hands and wail in a hotel lobby? But it’s not how I am.”
If
not a cheerful beam, though, success will at least bring something. It will
bring more like me — journalists who want to ask about his children, a topic he
insists we don’t discuss “because it’s irrelevant”, and who, in his own words,
apply “scrutiny of his worth as a human being”.
“That’s
completely out of my hands.” He spreads them dismissively. “It goes on a lot in
the world, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I think it’s very, very silly,
but who cares in the end? It’s all effluent. Apparently, I don’t do interviews,
but I’ve done at least 13 million interviews. There is nothing left to say, of
course, but they keep asking. It’s necessary, but it makes you feel like one of
those guys standing outside a dodgy restaurant saying ‘Come in, come in’, or a
fairground huckster with a performing monkey.”
And
with his final quote, I’m happy to leave, safe in the knowledge that, for all
his novel-writing, there will remain a part of Dylan Moran that is for ever
eremitic. And as long as journalists interview him, it will have a chance to
thrive.
· Dylan Moran is on tour and will
appear at the Palace Theatre, W1, May 17-23; box office 0870 890 0142
