Camping It Down
Sleeking its way down James Dreyfuss’ surprisingly muscular left arm is the word Iago, tattooed in bold black lettering. “I got that done when I was living and working in LA on the doomed Bette Middler show. The part I most want to play is Iago, so I just had it written on my arm. I just think it’s the most fascinating part. Cassius is another. I like all the malcontents in Shakespeare: they’re my favourite parts.”
On the basis of his most notorious roles in The Thin Blue Line and Gimme Gimme Gimme, this might conjure an odd image. That Iago should skip soft-footedly whilst professing his honesty, or launch limp-wristedly into “I am not what I am”, whilst not totally incongruous, seems a little implausible. However to form such a perception would be to do Dreyfuss a great injustice. It would be to tar him in the same mould as his characters.
“People thought I was this camp,” he trails off, seemingly lost for the politically correct word, “they’d come up to me and be like, ‘Hi, girlfriend,’ and I’d just go, ‘Get off!’ I am gay, but I’m not a camp person. People are getting it confused and it’s beginning to really irritate me. “I got a phone call asking me to comment on a show called the Top Ten Camp Idols, or something. When I declined, the guy said, ‘But you’re in it.”
I said, ‘Well, I shouldn’t be, I’m not camp.” I mean, it was full of all these wonderfully naturally camp people, like Dale Winton and Graham Norton, and I’m not like that.” In his dressing room at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he is currently in The Producers, James Dreyfuss cuts a confident figure. At a guess, one might gamble on his sexuality, but it is far from obvious. Sitting legs crossed and upright, but not uncomfortably so, his gestures are deliberate and solid.
He takes a final drag on another Marlborough Light, before grinding its tip into a terracotta ashtray. “I don’t think about my sexuality ever. EVER. It bores me.” With this in mind, it may seem a little odd that in The Producers he once again plays a stereotypically camp character, Carmen Ghia. “Well, my agent rang and said, ‘They want to see you for The Producers.’ And I went, ‘Oh, which one?’ And they went, ‘No, no, no, not one of the main two.”
So I sighed and said, ‘Right, you mean the camp assistant.’” Whilst the sigh might betray Dreyfuss’ feelings about his constant typecasting, it in no way reflects his sentiments on the hugely successful and wonderfully fun production itself. He attributes its success to its Broadway run, where, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick starring, it was the biggest grossing show ever.
“Also, in all these very politically correct times, it’s so nice to do something that offends everybody, which is the point of comedy really.” And, centring on a newly camped up musical entitled Springtime for Hitler, universally offensive it is. “Apparently, we had a group of holocaust survivors in the other night. I’m not sure what they made of it all, but it might just be someone winding me up.” With a cast including Lee Evans, one can well imagine that such sporting japes go on.
Dreyfuss fully admits to being an “offender” when it comes to giggling. “In rehearsals, Lee and I were actually forbidden to look at each other onstage at all.” “I’ve never laughed so much in my life as when I’m onstage and not supposed to be laughing. I was in a pantomime with Graham Norton, about fifteen years ago at Harrogate.
He was operating the rabbits, and I was Puss In Boots, and I had to sing ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, and he was just saying things like, ‘Lick, lick, lick, lick, lick the bum, lick the c***.’ I just had to turn away from the audience: tears would actually be falling down my cheek. The more I knew I shouldn’t laugh, the more hysterical I got.”
And then, as if to reassert his soon to be highbrow career, he adds, “I wouldn’t do that, say, in Julius Caesar, but there are some places where you can laugh.” Dreyfuss is, of course, best known for his screen work, most notably Tom Farrell in Gimme Gimme Gimme. “Tom is a shit actor, who truly believes that he’s a good actor. He’s livid about the fact that he’s not in work and that people fail to see his genius. All those tricks of the trade he’s learnt, he’s learnt badly.
That, for me, has huge comic potential.” Nonetheless, Dreyfuss’ performance was savaged in the gay press, heralding Tom as an insulting stereotype in the vein of 1970’s gay characters, with some even going so far as to compare the show to the black-and-white minstrel shows. “The gay press are mostly tossers who don’t seem to like themselves very much. They saw things in Tom that they didn’t like about themselves.
If he had been played by some good-looking Adam Rickett type, I’m sure they would have loved it. I see Gimme Gimme Gimme as a Scooby Doo type cartoon that’s been taken far too seriously. “Had Tom been straight I would have played him exactly the same way. So hate it because you don’t like Tom’s character. Hate it because you don’t like the writing. Don’t hate it because it’s setting the gay cause back twenty years.
And if it has done that, then the gay cause doesn’t deserve to have advanced over twenty years at all.” More recently, he took his chances on reality TV, appearing alongside Edwina Currie, Abi Titmuss and Jennifer Ellison in Hell’s Kitchen, as a pupil under Gordan Ramsey; a man Dreyfuss claims is not as “scary as he tries to be”. “Hell’s Kitchen was sold as a far classier affair than most reality shows.
I was told there would be no cameras in bedrooms or toilets like in Big Brother, so I was happier about doing it.” Nonetheless, he admits wanting to leave “about eight times every day”, describing the first week as “hell”. Why do it in the first place? “I really wanted to learn to cook, and at the time I also quite needed the money. And lastly because I wanted people to see me for who I am.” Hell’s Kitchen could be a first step towards this surprising reinvention.
“I don’t want to do any more humorous comedy sidekicks - certainly not in the theatre. In television, you take what you can, take the money and run. But in theatre, I’m not going to do any more camping about like this. I’ve done it already, and people say, ‘Yes, but you do it so well.’ That’s not really enough any more. I’m bored with it. “I used to resent the stereotype, but I don’t any more. I’m thirty six now, but when I turn forty I hope to get different roles.
As my face crags up the parts I can play will change. “Maybe one day people will say, ‘Isn’t that the guy who was always just camping around.’ I’ll be very happy.”
28th Apr 2005