‘I can’t do autopilot acting – it’s like wearing a straight-jacket’
Ben Meagher ventures further into Copenhagen’s theatre scene, meeting actor Ian Burns for (yet more) coffee and a discussion of the stage, wild misdemeanours, dodgy accents and rowdy English punch-ups.
A dull chime sounds, signalling my arrival on the top floor of an apartment block opposite Copenhagen’s town hall. I’m barely managing to stand upright in a manual elevator that looks as if it should have remained on the set of The Shining. After clumsily wrestling with the elevator grate, any Kubrick-related qualms I have are soon put to rest when a warm, broad smile greets me from the doorway.
The smell of freshly filtered coffee in the apartment is almost as strong as the colours framed across the walls from prints of a limited-run exhibition from the Guggenheim to glass-encased posters of Hergé’s Tintin to original works by contemporary artists. ‘My wife likes to collect these’, Ian explains. ‘She works as a documentary film producer, so she’s really busy. She won an Oscar three or four years ago for her film Taxi To The Dark Side. She works just down the road’ he says, as he points generically behind him. ‘I’m just a house-husband really!’ But it’s not this, nor the chic Scandinavian designed furniture that take me aback; It’s the sun shining in through the loft windows, a sun that rarely shows itself in Denmark. ‘It’s a schizophrenic city at the best of times. It’s lovely here between May and September, but it gets a bit introverted after that’.
No matter what month it is, Ian Burns is far from introverted. His cart wheeling gestures, boyish wonder and buoyant chirpiness herald three decades of acting. Before immigrating to Denmark in 1991 – meeting his future wife and forming his own English-speaking theatre company in the process – he toured in the original productions of shows such as the musical Lennon and Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers. ‘He was our resident writer at Manchester Polytechnic, our drama school’, Burns quips. ‘He used us as his guinea pigs to write a lot of his stuff; Stags and Hens, Doors of Albion, Educating Rita and Blood Brothers.’ However, the latter soon prompted a departure from the bright lights of the West End. ‘The big mistake was going back to Blood Brothers after it had become this mega success. It was this monolithic Goliath. They weren’t playing it; they were just doing it – eyes dead to a thousand people each day. For me it was like wearing a straight-jacket. I can’t do autopilot acting.’ A power outage prompted Ian to ad-lib during one performance, much to the dismay of his stage manager. ‘A real kind of a toad, you know?’ he informs me, as he twists his shoulders into some malformed caricature from Wind in the Willows. ‘If we deviated from a word or made a longer pause he would write it up. He had different pens for different misdemeanors.’ Eventually these colorful annotations were sent to the show’s producer, Bill Kenwright, who also owns Everton football club. ‘He was livid’, Burns remarks, before pitching his voice an octave higher and squinting his eyes tighter as he prepares to imitate the Liverpudlian’s barrage of anger; ‘“How many times do you keep foch-ing about Burnsy?! You’re so undisciplined. What are you s’pose to do in these sit-u-ations? Why can’t you do tha?” He started poking me, so I grabbed hold of his finger and said, “I’m not frightened of you Bill. I’ll leave the show. I’ll just go home, go to the pub. In fact, I’m going to the pub.”’
One shortened contract and a few G&T’s later the scene was a blessing compared to other mishaps on stage during the eighties. An avid spokesman for Equity, Burns was no stranger to the hazards of theatre. ‘West End is notoriously bad unless you really keep an eye on it’, he warns me. ‘The producers will try to cut corners. The set of Les Misérables for example was a really dangerous set. It looked really good; barricades and shit, but they had really sharp, metallic angles. So in blackouts a lot of actors were getting badly cut. There was a woman in a show once who almost had her foot ripped off by this treadmill device. She was walking off, it faded to black and her foot got caught. She was the only one who knew what was happening. There should have been some kind of stop switch, but nobody thought about that. Her career was over. She could never dance again.’
The word ‘show’ is never unaccompanied by ‘business’ and the gap between ‘comedy’ and ‘corporate’ is shrinking in the same way. Burns’ Reumert-nominated play (a prestigious Danish award named after the actor Poul Reumert) brought its own anxiety with it after being named Jurassic Pork. ‘My mate Tom came up with the title, despite the fact we weren’t doing a parody of Jurassic Park’, he laughs. ‘Just to be sure I rang up Steven Spielberg’s agents to get clearance. I got through to this very, very dry, unemotional lawyer and told him that our sketch show had no reference to dinosaurs; it was just the title we wanted to use. “I… see. Why?” he asked me. I told him that I asked my mate the same question, but it’s making people smile before they even come to see the show. “Well ah, y’know I’ll get back to you on that, but it’ll be nice to, ah, see a script, just so we, ah, know – y’know?”’
Copenhagen is no exception to prying lawyers. ‘I’d been here about two years in Denmark when I went to see this Danish comedian doing a show he claimed to have written himself. I thought to myself that I recognized it: it dawned on me that the guy had just translated one of Robin Williams stand-up shows and put it up as his own. A week later he was about to go on when this lawyer from LA turned up, knocked on his dressing room door and handed him this slip of paper. “See you in court”, he said. “You know why”. It’s a small world’. If copyright law is a small world, then you can be certain the acting community in Copenhagen is even smaller. The plagiarizing perpetrator would attest that those who acted in commercials had sold their souls to the devil. ‘When he got that bill’, Ian sniggers, ‘he was in almost every commercial within two months; cat food, dog food, rowing boats, golf, dice – everything.’
Legal settlements such as these were a world away from the physical fights Burns found himself locked into back in London. A glance upward to a stocky man opposite him sprawled chaotically into a platform fist-fight at three o’clock in the afternoon, whereas a quick toilet break in Charring Cross station ended up with him hiding in a hairdressers’ garden in Elephant and Castle from a Dr. Marten-clad gang of skinheads. But none of these interfered with his auditions – until he moved to Peckham. ‘I waited for two years to be heard by the BBC’s radio repertory company. The night before I went to buy some cigarettes down the off-license using my wife’s bike and the sight of a bloke riding a woman’s bike was enough to set off this gang of twelve lads. When I came back out they had trashed the bike. I asked them for a pound each to fix the bike and they started to throw these coins at me – so being Scottish I picked them up.’ From penny picking to packing-punches, Burns ended up looking like he’d been in a fight with Mike Tyson. ‘The next day the BBC were going: “Oh hello! Ah, oh dear. I gather that you have had some altercation… wouldn’t you rather wait?” I said what for? Another two years?!’
In spite of this, the radio remains his close link with what’s going on back home. ‘Radio 4 is my oracle for news back home’, he confesses. ‘I don’t really read the Danish newspapers, they just seem to copy the world’s news from the Guardian, they’re too slow!’
Although only having seen one bar fight, Burns assures me that Denmark is far from being the cozy, laid back novelty it may seem. ‘They’ve become more xenophobic in the last six years’, he points out. ‘It’s not just the flags everywhere (for birthdays, in gardens, commercial advertising, any excuse to bang one on a bus) but the far-right political party, ‘Folkeparty’, have become more of a voice.’ Whilst walking back home one night, Burns was approached by a group of ten guys who started pushing him around. ‘I couldn’t really understand Danish back then, but I heard one of them say ‘Turkish’ and so I said, in my best English accent, that I was from Britain. “Undskyld!, they replied. Sorry! They even offered to buy me drinks after that.’
Burns’ first experience with a Danish theatre audience wasn’t far from the Fascist toll gating. ‘I was frightened by the applause because it was in unison. Five-hundred people all clapping at once. I thought they were going to take me up against a wall.’ The audience may have warmed up, but the critics remained cold and in the case of his recent production, Shakespeare’s Women, never even showed up. ‘When I got home I read the emails: “I wanted to come to see your show but my editor sent me somewhere else.” Another critic got a phone call on his way to divert him to another production, whilst the third was told not to go. If he went, he was told they would never publish it. You start to think, why? What’s that all about?’ It’s a poor return on his advertising costs, especially when the publicists have the same interest as the critics. ‘When we were doing one of our first shows, I was looking around and couldn’t see any of our posters. The guys who put them up have really weird names, like ‘Biscuit’ and ‘Jesus’, so I rang and got through to Jesus. “You do know what happened to the first Jesus don’t you?” I warned him. “Well, that will happen to you if you don’t put them up.” Surprise-surprise, they were all over the place within the hour.’
Yet these tribulations of deadlines, skinheads, lawyers, and critics all pale in comparison with what Banks tells me next: ‘A mate of mine from drama school, who I had fallen out with over criticism, sent me this text message about a month ago’. He takes out his mobile phone and puts on his glasses to read: ‘you’re the last friend I’m telling. I’ve got pancreatic cancer and I don’t know how long I’ve got left’. He slowly lays down the phone on the tabletop. ‘So that’s been lying heavily here’, he says, patting his chest. ‘There’s me thinking I might not finish this show; that I won’t make it. I know he won’t make it. All I have to do is a play. It’ll either be good or bad, but he won’t be there.’ He slides his glasses off down his nose. ‘It’s a bit of an eye opener’, he adds. Crestfallen, he slumps his cheek into the palm of his hand. No more funny accents, wild tales or explosive gestures. ‘You know, we had so many good laughs. I’d like to talk about those times with him… If possible.’ As I stand up to leave, from across the rooftops and in through the windowpane, the muffled dissonance of church bells sound.
Words: Ben Meagher