Puppet master

For Nina Conti it’s been a hell of day. Having just stepped off a flight from Las Vegas, she’s returned home to find that she’s forgotten that she had a gig booked for tonight. Thus our first phone call finds her running frantically out of the door, and our second discussion takes place whilst Conti is ensconced in the wings of a North London comedy club, waiting to perform.

Conti, it transpires, was in Las Vegas to attend a ventriloquism convention. That’s right, ventriloquism. Not a particularly common art these days, although it would appear that Conti’s sojourn in Las Vegas went some distance to explaining the profession’s dip in popularity.

“Some of them were just horrific”, explains Nina, “it was quite depressing actually. There were so many heartbreaking characters there, it was so weird. It was like a Star Trek convention without the glamour”. She laughs the laugh of someone who has perhaps seen too much over the past few days.

Far from being rooted in the comedy circuit, Conti cut her performance teeth as an actor, spending two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The leap from Shakespearian thesp to puppetry is perhaps not the most obvious of career moves.

“I didn’t know anything about ventriloquism really,” she admits. “It wasn’t seeing performers that sparked up my interest, if I had seen some I probably would never have tried my hand at it. I’d had a ruck with the voice department at the RSC, they said I didn’t know how to use my voice. A director called Ken Campbell bought me a box that had ‘Teach Yourself Ventriloquism’ on it and I decided to become a master ventriloquist.

“Then I found this monkey that belonged to an Irish actor called Will Houston, who was playing Henry V at the time, and I nicked it off him. That was my favourite puppet because it didn’t look like a spooky mannequin or anything and I thought if I do something with this it might be quite funny. So I filmed myself and it looked like the monkey was alive. It was quite exciting. So that’s how it happened”.

The next step was to take a one-woman ventriloquial farce called ‘Let Me Out’ to the Edinburgh Festival.

“It was a play written around me and these various puppets that I started talking to. Ken would write the characters into this play. There were twenty five different character voices in it, coming out of boxes and behind doors. At the end of that I was a bit disappointed in myself because I’d learnt this skill but had bottled out by doing it as theatre and really I should be trying it in the clubs. I booked myself into a club to do five minutes with no idea of what I would do”.

Having survived that initial experience, Conti and her monkey launched themselves onto the comedy world, proving themselves a formidable pairing on the live circuit. In the often intimidating world of comedy clubs, did Nina see her monkey as an extra shield from the audience?

“It’s more than a shield, it’s a weapon. When people go with it and believe in the monkey then it has got a power beyond any human at that point. There’s nothing I could say to undercut the monkey because everybody thinks it’s so real and amazing and exciting. No heckler can win. The monkey can get away with murder, it can say far more things than I ever could. It’s very good that I’ve found a vessel for the less acceptable side of my
personality”.

Alongside her work as a stand up, Nina has continued to act, most notably alongside Bill Bailey and Dylan Moran in Black Books, although she does not see the two as mutually exclusive.

“I’m acting all the time. If I’ve had any success as a ventriloquist it’s because of the acting. Ventriloquists aren’t normally actors, they don’t make a real effort to make the illusion work. Then it’s not someone just standing there all on their own”. She pauses. “Although it is me all on my own. It can be more terrifying sometimes because you have to prove yourself doubly. When you take the puppet out you see the audience go ‘oh my God, this isn’t going to be ventriloquism is it?’ You’ve got an extra battle to win. All the stuff I’ve been witnessing in Vegas made me realise what the problem is. When it doesn’t work it’s lonelier than anything else in the world. You really do look so much more alone talking to your hand”.

A cheer goes up in the background. Time for one last question. Are these comedy festivals like music gatherings with everybody hanging out together, or are comedians all tortured, solitary creatures who sit in their hotel rooms brooding and feeling depressed…

“Oh shit, I really have to go on, they’re announcing me…”. So I guess we’ll never know, although Nina doesn’t sound a particularly tortured soul to me. As for the monkey, we’ll have to wait find out…