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Bremner, Blair and Brecht
Evening Standard 20.03.07
Life imitates art: Rory Bremner is worried Blair is becoming a caricature of him
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Rory Bremner, idol of satirical impressionists, scourge of politicians, telephone-terrorist, has been accused of going serious of late.
"Bollocks!" was his crisp response earlier in the year when an interviewer dared suggest it. Now, he finds it harder to deny. His latest enterprise is a translation of Brecht's early short play, A Respectable Wedding, for the Young Vic.
Is this a new departure, a move away from mockery and comedic voices to a higher plane of art? "Ha! We shall see. I've given up justifying myself for Lent. There's nothing more tedious ..."
He says this with an air of dog-collar primness, partly brought on by the recent avalanche of attacks for his "Hello, it's Gordon" phone call to Margaret Beckett, but we'll come to that later.
"Sometimes, it's true. I get too serious and lose the plot. But then I remind myself I don't have to change the world. It's enough to have a laugh."
The role of translator returns Bremner, 45, to his student roots: he read French and German at King's College, London, and has already translated two operas (Weill's Silver Lake and Bizet's Carmen). He leapt at the chance to "return to dictionaries and libraries" when the Young Vic's David Lan put the idea to him.
"I love the verbal challenge of this kind of task, making the words fit like an endless crossword puzzle." Is his German fluent? "Hmm. If we were conducting this interview in German, you'd call me fraudulent. But translating is primarily about how expert your English is."
The play, written in 1919 when Brecht was 21, is a short farce on petit bourgeois manners and DIY failure. At a wedding feast, the bride is found to be pregnant. Everyone squabbles and the home-made furniture keeps breaking. Finally the happy couple fall optimistically into bed, which promptly collapses under them. Is this a scenario Bremner is familiar with?
"I've never made a bed collapse or drilled into a cable, but I do rate my DIY skills higher than does my wife [the artist Tessa Campbell Fraser], who thinks me incapable of rewiring a plug. But my cooking is rather good. I made a Victoria sponge cake for the local village fete. It didn't sell and the vicar took it away to use as a sanding attachment."
As he talks, he has been picking anxiously at his nose. "It's the rubbery bits, they get stuck," he apologises. This is less objectionable than it sounds. He has come straight from recording the latest series of Channel 4's Bremner, Bird and Fortune, the satirical sketch show he has done with the Johns Bird and Fortune since 1999. False noses are the norm for a man who spends most of his life being someone else. In conversation, however - though I had been warned he would never answer as himself - he rarely slips into character. Is he tiring of the targets he so brilliantly mimics?
"There's not much more I can do with Blair. I'll be glad to let him go. He's becoming a caricature of me, which is rather worrying. Blair is a stuck record. By extension, an impression of Blair is a stuck record. I'm looking forward to a different kind of inspirational energy."
Nonetheless Bremner has kept his humour sharp, having Des Brown selling Trident to the Dragons in Dragons' Den and, controversially, casting Lord Levy as Fagin.
"The words fitted so perfectly: 'You've got to sell a peerage or two'. Last time I played Fagin it was as Robin Cook, not known as a prominent member of the Jewish community, so I plead not guilty. What matters is your intention. I make a distinction between religion as a belief and as a political weapon."
Does he hope to find fertile new pastures with a Brown, or even a Cameron government? "Not necessarily. I'd like to write the lyrics for a musical." Who with? "Robbie Williams, maybe." Does Robbie Williams know this? "No, I don't even know him. But he has an astonishing confidence and that's what counts. Blair has that confidence too, and you underestimate him if you fail to recognise that."
Bored though he may be with Blair, Bremner remains hooked. "He's phenomenally resilient, with extraordinary powers of self-belief, or maybe self-deception, and a magical ability to persuade others. When he's good he's very very good." And when he's bad? "He invades Iraq."
On the contrary, Bremner claims to lack that kind of confidence. "It's why I like to hide behind things, whether characters or, as here, translating Brecht. Maybe I will write a play one day and this is good practice. But I don't have enough confidence as a writer, or as an actor come to that, to do either properly."
He is about to play a small cameo role in Kingdom, an ITV series with Stephen Fry. "I had to twist his arm to let me do it. I play a woman vicar. When I read the lines first, he said, 'I'm terribly sorry, but you're being Michael Howard.' I'm trying hard. Fortune and Bird are such experienced actors and really help me."
Neither, however, would have got away with that phone-call to Mrs Beckett, when he convinced her that he was Gordon Brown, recorded in 2005 but only made public a fortnight ago, when Bremner called it "extreme research". Still no remorse?
"Well, look, by the law of averages, I only get the right number once every 10 years: John Major to Richard Body, now Gordon to Margaret. A lot of people had a sense of humour failure. Pomposity crept in, especially from political journalists who spend their own lives gossiping and speculating behind people's backs."
There was a natural sympathy for Mrs Beckett, he points out, who spent a good few minutes discussing other members of the Government with Bremner.
"Had it been Prescott instead, the Schadenfreude would have been considerably enhanced." Surely he was hesitant when it came to dialling the number? "Absolutely terrified. It was as if you'd cracked the combination and the safe door suddenly swung open. It wasn't so much the gold you find inside as the fact that you'd done it. And you're on your own. Nobody has scripted it. It's like a game of high speed chess, and hard to assume the tone of their relationship. They [Brown and Beckett] might have gone out for a curry and got food poisoning the night before for all I knew."
Time is up. Rory Bremner has to get home to Oxfordshire and his two young daughters, Ava and Lila. "I get to the London theatre scandalously little. I want to be involved again. This wonderful satire on middle-class values has been a joy to translate. It's not an adaptation. This is definitely Blair, not Bremner." Blair? "I mean Brecht. Whoops." Old habits die hard.
• Rory Bremner's translation of A Respectable Wedding is part of the Young Vic's The Big Brecht Fest, with new versions of four of the playwright's short early plays. From 29 March; 020 7922 2922, www.youngvic.org.
