Julian Clary interview: ‘I've always been quite good at living dangerously’

The long dark winter for British theatre triggered despair, rage and grief. Across a blighted industry, as playhouses were plunged back into darkness, perhaps only one person was not wailing and gnashing his teeth. A year ago the comedian Julian Clary was all set to star in a revival of Ronald Harwood’s 1980 play The Dresser. Then the touring Theatre Royal Bath production was put on ice by the pandemic.

“A benefit to lockdown,” he admits sheepishly, “was I had a bonus year to learn it. Just as well, I think.” Clary makes this confession one lunchtime during rehearsals, safe in the knowledge that after many months of twice-weekly Zoom sessions with his co-star Matthew Kelly, he now finally knows all his lines.

“It’s quite a process for me,” says Clary, who is better known for his camp, innuendo-stuffed stand-up routines and one particularly outrageous joke about former Chancellor Norman Lamont at a 1990s awards show. “I’m not used to it. You’re supposed to think and move and act and remember all these different things. My instinct as a comedian is to [stand] centre stage and look up, but of course it’s not that game at all.”

When the offer first came to play Norman, a waspish alcoholic who “dresses” a tyrannical old actor-manager known only as Sir, a wary Clary turned it down. “I thought, ‘This is very dangerous’. A friend who knew the play very well said I ought to think again. I’m well aware I’m not a versatile actor, or versatile anything. But I just thought I could see a way into Norman. Maybe if I’d been born in a different era I might have ended up like Norman.”

Harwood’s love letter to theatre was inspired by his stint as a young dresser to an ageing Donald Wolfit in the 1950s (in a company also containing Harold Pinter). Clary has avoided consulting the screen performances by Tom Courtenay (1983) and Ian McKellen (2015) – “I thought things get stuck in your head,” he says. Instead, he is taking inspiration from dressers he has known from regular stints in panto.

“I don’t think I should,” he says when I ask him to talk about them in more detail. “Because they might recognise themselves. They’re very often very eccentric, let’s put it that way. Some are very well-balanced and businesslike people, and some have luggage. There’s a conflict between wanting to put all their energy into making someone perform as best they can, and jealousy and resentment.”

To get the tone of Norman’s drink problem, he is also drawing on his oldest school friend Nicholas Reader, who died two years ago. “He was very bright and very entertaining but I can think of a few parties where Nick would clear the room just being awful to people. When Norman gets drunk, that’s who I think of.”

Clary and Reader were both victims of homophobic persecution as students at St Benedict’s, a Catholic school in west London where the teachers were monks. One told Clary, “You bring it on yourself, you know.” A former tormentor turned up at the stage door years later. “He was one of the worst but he wanted to be there as old chums. I said, ‘Yes I do remember you’ and I wouldn’t let him in.”

In the circumstances, the stage “was literally a safe space from all the bullying, which got quite violent. We found a little room where costumes were kept and used to disappear up there during break times and have a high old time.” He still remembers a first addictive hit of audience appreciation when, playing Paris in Romeo and Juliet, he said, “O I am slain” and got a laugh.

There was more acting when he studied English and drama at Goldsmiths College, in London, but after he became a comedian the acting faded. He was in a long-lost Genet play in the 1990s, then played Leigh Bowery in the Boy George musical Taboo in 2004 and the Emcee in Cabaret three years later.

Then, four years ago, he starred in Le Grand Mort, a two-hander written specially for him and performed in the tiny Trafalgar Studios 2. The play was not well received but he got a taste for “moving people in a silent way”.

“The reassurance of getting a laugh is very addictive, but you can pick up on other moods and it’s what I’m here to do,” he says. “I’ve always been quite good at daring myself and living dangerously and it’s quite good to be outside your comfort zone.”

Wearing black trousers and a black shirt with a white-patterned collar, Clary in person is much as you would expect him to be. The feathery voice is polite and watchful, the head tilts and wobbles ironically. At 62, his hair is tending gracefully to grey and the face is a little fuller. When I ask him if there’s anything he misses about being young, all he can think of is a 28in waist. “But I don’t know if that would be exciting for long. Now is not a bad age. I’ve got a few aches and pains and things are deteriorating. You get happier I think as you get older. I breeze around quite cheerily.”

There is much to be cheery about. He describes himself as “a happily married man” – he and his partner Ian Mackley married in 2016. There remains a healthy audience for his stand-up (his Covid-interrupted tour, Born to Mince, resumes in March next year). And then there is his parallel career as a children’s author. The Bolds, set in Teddington where he grew up, features a family of hyenas disguised as humans whom Clary invented as imaginary neighbours when he was a solitary child.

“The thrill of making children laugh who don’t know anything about me is exactly the same thrill as making anyone else laugh,” he says. The stories are pitched at seven- to 10-year-olds – “that window before cynicism kicks in”. At 10 he was embarking on DH Lawrence. “My mother had them on the bookshelves. I was told off by the monks for having read Sons and Lovers. I didn’t have any friends so I had to read a lot.”

No interview with Clary would be complete without a reference to that notorious gag about Norman Lamont, a joke so rude it provoked a campaign in one tabloid newspaper to have him banned from TV. “You missed your chance to break the mould,” he says with a little of Norman’s waspishness. “No it was a very good joke and I stand by it,” he adds.

Nearly 30 years on, his career could not be healthier. The Lick of Love, a follow-up to his memoir A Young Man’s Passage, is coming out next month, themed around his dogs. Then he is back in pantomime at the London Palladium this Christmas. And before that there is Norman. Perhaps he sails on because he is deft at avoiding political booby traps. “No, I don’t think I’d have a strong opinion,” he says when I ask if Norman should always be played by a gay actor.

In the same manner, he plays what you might call a straight bat to trans issues. “All I want to do on Twitter is make people smile, and if you fall down that rabbit hole…” he tails off. “The greatest success I’ve ever had is a picture of my mother on her 90th birthday. It had something like 46,000 likes. As I’m not a woman and I’m not trans I can get through my life without getting too upset about it. Leave it to someone else.”

The Dresser is at the Theatre Royal Bath from Thursday and then touring. Tickets: theatreroyal.org.uk