Theatregoer Magazine
March 2003

As if being the undisputed king of quirky characters and darling of Broadway wasn’t enough, actor Alan Cumming has now turned out his first novel.

Words Al Senter Pictures Francis Hills

The London stage has seemed a little less vibrant and a little more monochrome since New York took Scottish actor and writer Alan Cumming to its collective bosom as only New York can. His elfin presence, at once angelic and diabolic, lit up the stage with a mesmerising dynamism given to few other actors and found its apotheosis in the character of the emcee in Sam Mendes' production of Cabaret. When the show transferred to the Club Expo in Times Square, New Yorkers fell greedily upon his extraordinary talent and Cumming was largely lost to a British entertainment business that seemed perplexed by a performer blessed with such outstanding gifts. After a solid apprenticeship in Scottish theatre and television, Cumming had been borne southwards from Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre to the Royal Court on the excitement generated by his performance in The Conquest of the South Pole. Yet the RSC could find little use for him save for supporting Antony Sher in Singer and, although Cumming had better luck at the National in a revival of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, his astonishing tour de force in the shockingly undervalued La Bete at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1992, complete with a 27 minute monologue that raised the theatre's venerable roof, fell largely upon stony ground.

Cumming, now lionised by New York and Hollywood's favourite oddball, has become a chat show regular where his breezy candour makes him a reliably disruptive guest. In 2000 the Scot received the ultimate American showbiz accolade when he was asked to host the iconic Saturday Night Live, and even Vanity Fair joined in the excitement by nominating him as 'One of the 20 people who, during 1999, changed the world.' It all seems a very long way from the remote Scottish woodlands where he spent his childhood and from his Donmar Hamlet, described by one journalist as 'a waif in black cycling shorts'. Now he has turned novelist with Tommy's Tale, an engaging and warm hearted account of a 1990s London life that's lived for sensual gratification until stirrings of commitment signal that the party may be over.

Cumming has always pursued writing in tandem with his acting career. He first came to prominence as one half of Victor and Barry, a comically precious duo of amateur thesps who rose from the obscurity of the Edinburgh Fringe to become something of a showbiz institution. He rejoined his professional partner Forbes Masson to create the frantic campery of The High Life, a BBC2 sitcom with the boys as winsome stewards working for a creaking Scottish airline. Fresh from the feature film The Anniversary Party in which he shared acting, writing, producing and directing credits with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Cumming now has the clout to attract a welter of writing commissions. But it was precisely to escape such responsibilities that he turned to the novel. 'Writing Tommy's Tale was a kind of secret hobby' he explains. 'I wrote it for me because I wanted to step off the treadmill of script development and not have to show my work to lots of other people. It was a personal project and it was good simply to sit down, start to write and see what came out.'

An enthusiastic party animal, Cumming was interested in returning to the buzzing London club scene of the 1990s, a setting he knew well from first hand experience. In Tommy he has created a contemporary Peter Pan, but a Peter Pan whose ardent pursuit of bisexual pleasures and drug induced highs might raise a few eyebrows in Never Never Land. As something of a sybarite himself, he's been quoted as saying 'I'm hedonistic rather than decadent... hedonistic means you love fun. You live life for fun.' Cumming refuses to take a high moral tone with the way that Tommy chooses to live his life. 'I purposely don't comment on the kind of drugs and clubs and sex lifestyle led by Tommy and his friends I want the readers to make up their own minds. From the outside it may be perceived as empty hedonism but Tommy doesn't think what he's doing is bad. As he says, everything in moderation, including moderation.'

The scenes of drug taking and sexual activity in the novel are vividly depicted. 'By writing so graphically, I wanted to demystify and desensitise a world that most people don't know. I wanted to shock and many people were shocked when the book came out in America. People are very quick to condemn and to judge but the book gives the outside world a chance to see the characters' lifestyle from the inside. I was also interested in writing about the male desire to be a parent, a subject that has not been well documented. Tommy is struggling to grow up and part of that process is making an emotional commitment. Yet such a commitment clashes with his philosophy of doing what he likes. At the same time, I have introduced elements of a fairy tale into the book and since all fairy tales need a happy ending, I have given the story a ridiculously happy one.'

Reviewers will, no doubt, chew over the parallels between Tommy and the character's creator, although Cumming denies any direct connection. 'Tommy is based on people I knew. I went clubbing a lot and I saw a lot of Tommys.' Yet there are clearly autobiographical as well as philosophical similarities. Tommy's one time girlfriend, India, a willowy model turned actress carries distinct echoes of Saffron Burrows, with whom Cumming was linked after they were both cast in the film Circle of Friends. And Cumming, like Tommy, was an Islington resident and an habitué of the Almeida Theatre bar Baleful descriptions in the novel of the worthies who flock to the north London venue show that Cumming has lost none of his satirical edge nor his sharp eyed observation. Almeida groupies will laugh a little nervously and a little too heartily at the accuracy of Cumming's wit.

At 38, Cumming retains his perpetual boyishness and, for all his protestations of pleasure seeking, he has an astonishing appetite for work. In his professional life he veers dramatically from Hollywood crowd-pleasers, such as the role of Nightcrawler in the forthcoming blockbuster X Men 2 'I was in make up every morning for four hours but at last I'm a superhero!' to the high minded manifesto of The Art Party, the company he formed to 'bring together artists from different media… to collaborate in the redefining and re-examining of classic texts, creating a new style of contemporary performance.' Last year, following an acclaimed Broadway revival of Coward's Design For Living with Jennifer Ehle and Dominic West, Cumming returned to the stage to appear in a rare outing of Elle by Jean Genet, with costumes by Vivienne Westwood, moving one critic to describe the actor as 'a cross between the medieval-faced poetess Edith Sitwell and Al Pacino.' Future plans include a production of Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice, possibly with Faye Dunaway as the abandoned woman and Cumming, on video, as her lover. This might enable him to star in the proposed gay version of Hart To Hart, to which his name has been linked. or complete the London based screenplay he is currently writing, Alternatively, he could return to his native Scotland for a remake of the heart warming Greyfriars Bobby, 'I'd play Bobby's master, a really nice man who is always coughing and dies a romantic, consumptive death.' But shall we ever see Cumming enliven the London stage again? 'Rehearsing Cabaret during the day and then going on to do Hamlet at night really scunnered me and it made me feel that I never wanted to do theatre again,' explains Cumming. 'I do love it, but I find it so exhausting that I can't do it all the time. I've been offered stuff but I've never thought "Wow! I must do this." When you have a life elsewhere, you have to be really keen on the piece to work in the theatre.'

Although Cumming retains his links with Scotland as one of Secretary of State Helen Liddell's Friends of Scotland and as Ambassador for Angus, the area where he grew up he is now a resolute New Yorker and, a country boy at heart, he has found a rural retreat upstate.

“I never thought that I'd end up living in America. It's all been a happy accident and naturally I'm making the best of it what else can you do?' argues Cumming. 'In London I always felt like an outsider because London always reminds you that you are different. In New York, on the other hand, everyone is different. I read somewhere that 60 per cent of people who live in New York weren't born here so everybody has come to New York from somewhere else. I'm attracted by that mix of accents and cultures.'

In a bizarre twist of fate, Cumming is now having to demonstrate skills that he may have inherited from his forester father and that parallel his first major screen role, as a sinister woodcutter in the long running Scottish soap opera Take the High Road. 'In buying these 11 acres of forest, I seem to have returned to the kind of heavily wooded landscape where I grew up, near Carnoustie. Over Christmas I amazed my friends by dressing in my checked jacket, protective chaps and ear flaps and going out into the snow to take a chainsaw to one of the trees. Such activity gives me enormous pleasure. It's a bit like dancing – you don't have to think while you're doing it and it leaves you with a very nice, comfortable tiredness.'

Like all expatriates, his sense of national identity grows stronger the further he travels from his native soil. 'It's only when you're away from your home country that you realise the effect it has had on you. I think being Scottish has made me more garrulous and more willing to engage with people and to understand them. Being Scottish also allows you to get drunk and throw meat pies and since I've noticed that there's a deli near my office in New York that advertises fresh Irish soda bread, I'm sure that they could also make authentic Forfar bridies Why not?'

New Yorkers had better beware pastry parcels of meat and onions may soon be flying through the air towards them. Yet even if contact is made, Alan Cumming's cheeky boy charm and his prime status as America's favourite scallywag should keep him out of trouble. Let's hope that he'll be lobbing bridies down Shaftesbury Avenue as well as down Broadway very soon.