Feature: Nina Conti at Soho Theatre from December 3-12

Published: 25 November, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

• HER best friend and co-conspirator has for years been a foul-mouthed monkey. Nina Conti has traipsed round theatres and festivals, comedy nights and clubs, with the shock-jock simian attached to one hand, witnessing with a mixture of awe and disgust his expletive-ridden soliloquys and his readiness to bite the hand that feeds him.

But now Monkey, as the ventriloquist calls the creature she has played the straight woman to for the best part of a decade, has competition. 

A Christmas run at the Soho Theatre will give fans of the comedienne a chance to meet three more acerbic and unrepenting characters hurling insightful – and inciteful – volleys at Nina and her audience.

“Wait till you meet Leonard the Owl,” she says. “I suppose you can best describe him as a passive/aggressive type – he is a little bit fey, and a little bit paranoid – artistic, if you will.”

The new characters come from the estate of the late ventriloquist Ken Campbell. He was Nina’s mentor and she was entrusted as their guardians in his will.

“I never heard them with Ken so I don’t know their voices,” she admits.

“They had a past with Ken, but I hadn’t seen it, so I had to consider what I wanted them to become. 

“The first voice I gave Leonard was rather silly – I have possessed it for some time. It was just the case of finding the right character for it. It’s based, I suppose, on an archetypal Hampstead liberal. 

He is of dubious sexuality – sexually ambivalent, perhaps...”

The second newcomer to Nina’s show is Granny – an ageing Scottish matriarch whose voice reminds her very much of her own grandmother, and who has proved so far to be a smash hit with her audiences.

“She is very much alive within me,” she says of her grandmother, who is the actor Tom Conti’s mother.

“It is a voice I really like to do, and she is very real.”

Her grandmother’s caustic Scottish wit comes over “in the politest way,” she says. 

“Where Monkey put people on the back foot, Granny has much more charm.”

“I am ad-libbing more than before and Granny is an easy one as it is someone I grew up with.”

Then comes Lydia who is loosely based on a stereotypical New York Jewish woman. Nina says she toyed for so long on a voice for this creation that it became part of the act.

“She is very glam and Botoxed, that much I do know – but she is searching for herself,” says Nina. “I thought to myself: who are you? What do you sound like? I tried voice after voice after voice, over and over again.”

The new characters and a request from director Bill Dear, who worked on the satirical ITV puppet show Spitting Image, for more ad-libbing has set a new challenge for her.

“There is a massive amount of multi-tasking,” says Nina. “But improvisation – talking and operating the characters – is a challenge that also gives you freedom to go where you want.”

But while these three new characters all vie for Nina’s attention, fans of her previous work have nothing to fear: Monkey is far too scary to ever allow himself to be completely sidelined, or stuffed in a cupboard and retired.

“I could never get rid of him,” she says. “He is like a wayward son.”

• Nina Conti is at Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1, from December 3-12. 020 7478 0100, www.sohotheatre.com