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Following the hugely successful sell-out tours of
Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent and Notes From A Small Island,
actor Steve Steen and writer/director Paul Hodson have teamed up
again to embark on a national tour with a new adaptation of Bryson's
hilarious number one best seller, Down Under. Gill Isted talks to
Steen ahead of performances of the new show at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in
Mold.
COMEDY Store player Steve Steen, who regularly
featured in the last series of Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel
4, is thoroughly enjoying his third Bill Bryson show and is looking
forward to appearing at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold on Monday and
Tuesday next week (March 15 and 16).
'It's fantastic,' he laughs. 'In Small Island, I
played 81 characters, in Lost Continent I played 67 and this time
it's down to 56. It's a great laugh. I read the book before the show
got into rehearsal and it's amazing how much I didn't know about
Australia! It's so vast and so few people live there - only six to a
square mile and they're all in the cities. It's a vast empty
continent full of the most dangerous creatures you can imagine.
'Take the Titan snake - if you get bitten by that
and don't receive an antidote in seven seconds, you're dead! That's
the most frightening thought in the world!
'It really is an amazing country. Bill went there
three or four times and fell in love with it - he thought it was a
most wonderful place. Going from Perth to Sydney is like going from
London to New York without crossing the ocean!
'I've never been myself but I wish I could go -
hopefully, this will be my ticket Down Under! If I could take the
show there, I'd enjoy it immensely and I'd make sure I visited some
of the places Bill went to.
'He went to the outback - you can't say you've
been to Australia unless you go to the outback! - so he hired a car
and took himself out for a jaunt into the baking wilderness - they
gave him loads of diesel in case he got lost - and he ended up in
one place where it's so hot that the houses are buried in the grass.
He found some wonderful places but also some very inhospitable
ones.'
I ask if Bill Bryson has actually seen any of the
shows based on his books and Steve replies: 'He saw The Lost
Continent but he hasn't seen this yet. He came up to me afterwards
and said he didn't remember the book being so funny so it can't be
too bad
'Paul (Hodson) has done a fantastic job with it.
It's so difficult to select which pieces to do when you're asked
which is your favourite part of the book. I'm sure there are bits we
miss out that people are disappointed not to hear but the reaction
so far has been great, audiences seem to enjoy it. We've been to
Norwich, Oxford, Croydon and the reaction so far has been really
good - they went bananas over it in Norwich so we've got to keep it
going.'
Steve's current tour schedule sounds pretty
demanding - at least 62 dates before the first week in June then it
will transfer to Edinburgh for the Festival, which happens to be
celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
'Thirty years of festivals but no, I haven't
attended them all. I wouldn't last - I'd have to donate my liver to
science if I did that, though I have been going there on and off for
many years and it's quite brilliant, a party every day!' laughs
Steve.
Reading his CV that covers the best parts of two
sheets of A4 - Shakespeare, Porridge (the film version), CBTV, the
Kenny Everett Show, Carrott Confidential, Saturday Night Live,
Russel Harty's Christ -mas Party, Wogan, Blackadder the Third, A Bit
of Fry And Laurie, Red Dwarf, Clive Anderson Talks Back, Have I Got
News For You, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, The Bill - to name but a few
- I ask Steve which, if any, has he enjoyed most.
'I enjoyed Whose Life Is It Anyway?,' he says.
'It's something people remember and its been round the world several
times, people seem to enjoy it. That's where my theatre roots are,
in improvisation - I've been doing that since 1974. It's difficult
to pick things out - I enjoyed working with Rory Bremner and now I'm
working with the two Johns - John Bird and John Fortune -'and that's
superb, I just sit there and watch them and laugh, I can't believe
I'm getting paid for it as well. They're superb to watch, masters of
what they do, and it's great to see them up close at first
hand.'
The current tour, he adds, is taking him
backwards and forwards across Britain to such an extent that he
knows parts of the motorway system from memory.
'It's ludicrous - I can reel off the names of all
the exits on the M40 with no problem,' he says.
'Still, it keeps me busy and it certainly keeps
me off the streets!
'I was in Mold last year with Notes From A Small
Island. It was packed out and I had a great time, it went down a
storm. This is a different kind of show. There are a lot of
reference points in Small Island to places we know but this is about
a country we think we know only to discover we don't know as much as
we thought. It will be a good learning process for everybody.'
Ambition-wise, Steve doesn't ask for much. 'To
put my feet up for longer than two weeks and to be able to sleep for
about 12 hours!' he says.
'I just don't seem to get any time at the moment,
it's all been a bit of a rush since we started and I would like just
a little bit of time off to put my feet up for a week or two.
'I'm planning to talk to some people from
Australia tonight so I may be able to get something going there.
Meanwhile, time off is all I'm asking. I know we've only just
started, we've been on tour for a couple of weeks, but we were in
rehearsal for three weeks before that and I was involved with other
things before that.
'Mind you, it is an enjoyable thing to do and I
never get tired of doing it. The only thing that's tiring is going
from one place to another, usually a good afternoon's drive. I do
use public transport but we all know what that's like!
'If this tour is anything like the last one, it's
going to be a hoot because that was a really good laugh. The great
thing about this country is that people don't differ, they're pretty
similar wherever you go. When I did Small Island, there were things
about Bryson's visit to Wales that they appreciated in Mold more
than in other places and I think the appeal of this show will be a
bit broader in that Australia is still a fairly exciting country and
everybody starts off on the same foot knowing as much about it,
probably, as the person next to them and learning together as it
progresses.'
Steve is anxious not to close the conversation
without mentioning all the other people who have made the show
possible. He says: 'It's a big tour and there's a big team for a
one-man show - Paul Hodson who wrote and directs it, Dave Blake on
lights, Dominic Wiffen who runs the show as company stage manager,
and Steve Wriggly and Roy Cameron who do the sound. It's all
original music and they've done a brilliant job, as have the people
in the publicity department.' | 
