Mr Ordinary in a previous life, the actor who recently stages Adolf now enjoys elbowing a reaction out of his audiences. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
“I am an angry person,” says Pip Utton. “I’m angry about things in the world, and things around me.” This is unexpected, for a number of reasons. Not just because he looks like what he is, a middle-aged British tourist on vacation. Not just because he’s lived for years in the small town of Frome, Somerset, happily married to Nikki, a medical scientist (they have two boys: Sam, 24, and Charlie, 19). Not just because Nikki is sitting beside him in the lobby of the Princess Hotel in Larnaca, listening amiably to our conversation – but also because Pip himself is so amiable, a ruddy-faced figure with clear blue eyes and a calm, self-deprecating style. At one point, as he gestures with his hand, it knocks against the table slightly – and he instantly says “Oh, sorry”, the polite person’s automatic response to any kind of noise or disturbance. Angry? I think not.
Yet there’s more to it than that – because, once his brief vacation is over, Pip will be moving from the Princess Hotel to various theatres in Nicosia, Limassol and Larnaca, donning swastika and familiar moustache and transforming himself into Adolf Hitler for his one-man show Adolf, presented by the Fresh Target Theatre Ensemble. He wrote the play in 1997, and it changed his life. “It became…” he says, then shakes his head, as if unable to convey the enormity of it all: “well, it just became massive. And it’s been touring ever since.”
This is actually a play with a sting in the tail, a twist I can probably divulge now that most of the shows are over – only the Larnaca one remains, tomorrow at 8.30 at the Scala Theatre – though I’ll try not to spoil too many details. The play lasts an hour and 15 minutes, of which the first 45 or so consist of Pip in Hitler garb, showing “how he managed to persuade a whole nation to follow him,” as he puts it. Then, for the last part, he takes off the mask and turns into ‘himself’, an ordinary chap cracking jokes and asking the audience for a cigarette – except he’s not really Pip Utton, he’s “the racist you might meet in a bar”, an angry little man whose jokes turn increasingly offensive. The audience, lulled into a false sense of security, is forced to re-examine its response – and of course connect this small-time fascist to the evil dictator they’ve been watching for the past 45 minutes.
“Sometimes people think they’ve been conned into buying a ticket about Adolf Hitler,” chuckles Pip. Some viewers think they’ve been somehow lured into watching neo-Nazi propaganda, and of course are furious. “People forget they’re watching a theatre piece, they think they’re actually watching a racist. Some people walk out, some people shout at me. I’ve had a lady get onstage and punch me!” His eyes seem to twinkle at the memory. “It can be quite… well, it can be quite edgy,” he says mildly – then laughs with delight: “It’s great fun!”
Needless to say, the last part of the show couldn’t work if Pip didn’t look and sound the way he does – amiable, jocular, “Mr. Average”. He’s still playing a character, of course, but “the faces I pull are mine, sometimes” and the voice is closer to his own voice, not the guttural bark he adopts for Hitler. In other words, his double-edged persona is even more twisted than it first appears. It’s not just that there’s a disconnect between Angry Pip and Amiable Pip – it’s also that, on stage, he uses Amiable Pip to further Angry Pip’s agenda, offering himself as bait as if to say ‘Beware! Looking average can also be a mask!’ It’s a tactic – as Pip happily admits – that Hitler himself might’ve envied. “It’s an exercise in manipulating the audience,” he explains in his calm, honeyed voice, “exactly as Adolf Hitler manipulated people.”
Maybe it’s because he’s had so much practice looking amiable – and often feeling angry and frustrated behind the mask, especially towards the end of his real-life ‘first act’. “This is a mid-life change for me. I didn’t start till I was 44,” he notes (he’s now 59) – and acting barely featured in his early life, apart from some amateur dramatics on the weekends. For 25 years he worked as a gemmologist, valuing jewellery and identifying gemstones, the only major ripple in his placid existence being a divorce from his first wife at the age of 30. (He married Nikki a couple of years later.) Didn’t Angry Pip chafe under these constraints? But it seems he hadn’t yet made his appearance. “You didn’t start getting angry till you were about 30,” points out Nikki, and he nods in agreement.
In fact, to hear him tell it, he started happy and only got happier. “I had a lovely, lovely warm childhood,” he enthuses. His father worked for a company that sold clocks; his mum was an infant-school teacher. “I had one of those glorious, warm, golden-glow childhoods that, if every child had a childhood like that, the world would be a happy place”. He came of age in the 60s, “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”, a time of hope and enthusiasm. He dabbled in the clock trade with his dad, met some jewellers and decided to make gemstones his profession (though admittedly “the passion was never there”). For years, he relates, “I was Mr. Ordinary. I got married when I was 21, to the girl I’d been going out with since the age of 12. I went to work every day, did a nine-to-five job, we had a little house, tried to make money. I played cricket. I was Mr. Average.” He stops, frowning slightly: “I mean, I still am Mr. Average. It’s just that what I do isn’t…”
Isn’t what? Isn’t average? Pip is “very uncomfortable” with the notion of Art, as you might expect from a former Mr. Ordinary – “I’m trying really hard not to use the word ‘Art’. Because I have a big problem with the word ‘Art’” – but there’s no doubt that what he does is unusual, not just being an actor but acting primarily in one-man shows that he writes himself (he “keeps meaning” to act in other people’s plays but rarely does so, though he’s played Macbeth and a few other roles). A psychiatrist might also wonder why he’s constantly drawn to the same kind of character – haunted, obsessive, controlling, larger-than-life men. His first big break (the play that first made acting a viable option, getting him noticed at the Edinburgh Festival) was as Tony Hancock, the tormented and finally suicidal English comic. Since then, in addition to Hitler, he’s played Charlie Chaplin, Francis Bacon, Charles Dickens and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Pip himself has a simple answer: “You need a hook for people to buy tickets”. He once wrote a play called Resolution, he points out, a tale of an ordinary man – and it got great reviews, but didn’t put enough bums on seats. Hitler and Co. draw big crowds; it’s simple commercial calculation. As for doing one-man shows, it’s what all actors would do if they could: “actors are so self-centred,” they’d kill for a show where the audience has no choice but to watch them – and vice versa. “I look straight at the audience,” he points out. “I have the privilege of looking straight into people’s eyes.”
True enough. Yet it’s also true that Pip hems and haws when I ask if he himself is obsessive. And it’s also true – though admittedly it’s true of many actors – that he’s very precise and particular about the layout of his dressing-room: his Hitler moustache is always here, he says, indicating a spot on the table, the glue for the moustache is always there. Preparation is key to his performance. “I have a routine,” he explains. “If I’m allowed to prepare the way I always prepare, and put my costume on in exactly the same order, and say exactly the same things, [then] I know that when I get onstage, I’ll be OK.”
He always dedicates each show to someone – his wife, or his boys, or the victims of the earthquake in Japan – though not in public but just to himself, in his dressing-room. “I have to tie my tie before I put my wig on, I cannot do it the other way round. There’s one sentence that I say – just repeating Nikki’s name, my name, my boys’ names, my father and mother’s names, who are dead now – I have to say that, every night. I have to do a couple of silly voice exercises, I don’t know where they came from but I have to do those. I have to stand in a certain way.” Just before a performance, he adds, “I become very solitary. Nikki knows to leave me alone, because she knows that whatever conversation she gets out of me won’t be gentle, or kind, or loving – or normal.”
‘Normal’, I assume, is Amiable Pip, the smiling British tourist sitting in the lobby of the Princess Hotel. The other guy is someone else, Angry Pip, who made his appearance quite late and gradually pushed his way through the life of the placid gemmologist, leaving him increasingly frustrated and putting him in touch with these turbulent, charismatic characters. It’s as though he has to be invoked through these complicated rituals before each performance, as though Pip literally has to reach into himself and find the Hitler or Hancock within.
What changed in his life? Becoming a father had something to do with it, he reckons, looking at the world his children would inherit and seeing that “prejudice and intolerance and racism were getting worse and worse”. The Royal Family is one of his bugbears (he shudders when I mention Wills and Kate), organised religion is another. Even the politics of being angry make him angry. “When you’re young,” he points out, “and you complain about things, and you’re angry and you go on demonstrations, you’re a revolutionary. When you’re 59 and you complain about things and you’re angry about things, you’re a grumpy old man! That’s not fair!”
Youth must be a constant source of aggravation to a man who only really found himself in his 40s. “There’s a touch of envy,” he admits, “when you realise that people – purely and simply because they’re younger – can run faster, jump higher, play football better, stay up longer, look more attractive. It’s not to do with any skill or talent or ability, it’s just because they’re younger!” He tries to keep up, especially with current music; he just spent five weeks with his son Charlie as his technician (Charlie’s now backpacking in Morocco), and listened to a lot of hip-hop in the process. Father and son were touring with Adolf, something they’ve done a lot over the years – everywhere from India to Estonia, Hong Kong to Belgium. “We’ve been round the world together as a family, because of it.”
What if it had happened 20 years earlier? But Pip Utton claims to have no regrets: “For me, when I went into acting, it was at exactly the right time,” he insists. “It’s never too late to change your life”. In a way, I wonder if it’s really the acting that motivates him. He’s not showbiz, after all. He doesn’t name-drop. He doesn’t come across as one of those actors who love being actors. I suspect it’s the power he really likes, the mischievous imp of winding people up and getting them to feel what Angry Pip wants them to feel. Sometimes during Adolf, he admits with a chuckle, “when I see the audience are getting agitated, I’m tempted to become worse and worse!” i.e. more and more outrageous. The gemmologist turned provocateur, disguised as a middle-aged English tourist. You couldn’t make it up.
