The comic with murder in mind

Jump forward to today, and a visibly energised Lucas is on a break from rehearsals for new play Prick Up Your Ears, which brings to life the searingly intense relationship between playwright Joe Orton, author of Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, and lover/mentor/ collaborator Kenneth Halliwell, played by Lucas.

Their time together in a cramped north London flat culminated in Halliwell’s brutal murder of Orton with a hammer before he himself committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills – hardly a rich seam of hilarious catchphrases and opportunities to dress up in vinyl outfits. The sheer intensity of the story, Lucas admits, meant a planned tour of the play last year may well have proved disastrous for him. “We were all set to do it, but then Tim Burton asked me to be in Alice In Wonderland,” he says.

“Everyone here was very kind and indulged me while I did that [Lucas will appear as Tweedledum and Tweedledee when the film is released in spring next year], but actually, I was going through a divorce last year, and I think it would have been too much for me. “We’re showing, in my character’s case, someone’s mental disintegration, and accessing real emotions, and I don’t think I’d have been able to do that last year. Just as I’m getting myself back together I’m able to destroy myself (laughs)!”

In an age dominated by confessional interviews, celeb tweets and mutual e-slagging on the web, Lucas and McGee made a refreshingly dignified gentleman’s agreement not to talk about one another publicly, and Lucas doesn’t linger long on the subject, focusing instead on the tangled, complex lives of Orton and Halliwell.

There’s a sense, as Lucas tucks into some lunch with director Daniel Kramer, Chris New (Joe Orton) and Gwen Taylor (who plays maternal neighbour Mrs Corden) that the story of Halliwell’s mental collapse in the face of his lover’s promiscuity and newfound celebrity has utterly captivated each member of this small company.

For Lucas, it seems the most obvious departure; stepping into Halliwell’s shoes represents his first dramatic stage role after appearances in Boy George’s Taboo and the BBC’s Krod Mandoon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire – but does he think of himself as a comic or an actor?

“Some people would say I’m neither. But I don’t know... I’m a show-off,” he says.

“But this isn’t entirely straight, it’s a black comedy and comedy and tragedy are always two sides of the same coin anyway – funny things happen at funerals, don’t they?”

Immediately after his death, Halliwell was demonised as a bitter man responsible for cutting down a talented young playwright in his prime, an idea reinforced by John Lahr in his biography of Orton and the subsequent Prick Up Your Ears film (written by Alan Bennett and starring Gary Oldman).

But this new play, scripted by Simon Bent, consciously gives Lucas’s character a fairer deal, something that’s perhaps only possible four decades later.

“We met lots of people who knew them, and there was a lot more warmth towards Ken than was displayed in the book. Nobody justifies his behaviour, but they’re a little more inclined, with the passing of time, to be understanding.”

Raised on the border between Stanmore and Edgware in northwest London’s Jewish community, Lucas had his fair share of trauma as a child, most notably the loss of his hair through alopecia when he was six (he has said it may have been delayed shock from an earlier car crash), the separation of his parents at ten and his father’s imprisonment because of what Lucas has called “cooking the books”

to save his failing aluminium importation business.

He’s insisted his own life isn’t bent into a hackneyed “tears of a clown” tragic narrative, but says our modern understanding of the effects of trauma means we’re open to seeing Halliwell as much as a victim as a perpetrator.

“When you think he was seven years old and his mother was stung by a wasp, had an allergic reaction and died in front of him. A few years later, he came downstairs and found his dad dead with his head in the oven. Years later, he kills his lover and himself, and we’re much more inclined with modern psychiatric learning to look at that and see the seeds of depression and a desensitivity to death were sown at that very young age.”

Halliwell’s time with Orton serves almost as a cautionary tale about the corrosive effects of success, but Lucas seems uneasy when asked if this is something he’s witnessed first-hand as half of one of the country’s most successful comic exports. “Damon Albarn said that when you get famous, you don’t change, everything around you changes,” he says. Was he right? “I wouldn’t make that kind of sweeping statement. In my own personal relationship I wasn’t with a comedian, so it wasn’t really that relevant, but in the case of Joe and Ken, they were both writers, and both had the same ambitions – I think you quantify your success against the other’s.”

Like any tempestuous relationship, from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to our very own Jordan and Peter, Orton and Halliwell’s doomed entanglement wasn’t purely a parade of unrelenting misery. Lucas says their working partnership was based almost entirely on making one another laugh, something that clearly resonates with his own writing partnership with David Walliams in Little Britain.

“This autumn, it’ll be 15 years since we started writing together, and for us it works because we still make each other laugh.”

With Little Britain on ice, but with the promise of a return for the likes of uber-chav Vicky Pollard and Bubbles DeVere in future Christmas specials, Lucas is confident about the material the duo have been working on between his acting work and Walliams’s recent foray into the world of children’s writing.

“I think the things we’ve been writing that no one’s seen yet are the best things we’ve ever done by quite some stretch, because we’ve become more and more instinctive,” he says.

“We know so much about each other we complete each other’s sentences, and working with Gwen and Chris you realise that’s something you have to build – you can’t assume anything – but David and I can make assumptions with each other. When we write a character we never discuss who’s going to play it – we never need to, we just know. With our relationship it’s like we’re brothers.”

After meeting nearly 20 years ago, the pair have managed to maintain a genuine friendship, despite rammed schedules, pressure to deliver, and a frenetic work rate.

“It’s really important you give each other space, but at the same time, we do socialise together as well.

“I’ll get a text or an email from David saying ‘What are you up to tonight?’ and we’ll go out for dinner or something like that. You have to nurture it, you have to tend to it, like a garden, and maybe that’s what Joe and Kenneth didn’t do.”

It seems particularly pertinent that Prick Up Your Ears is coming to Brighton (only its second stop on a brief tour before it reaches the West End), in that Orton and Halliwell were hoping to bust out of their pressure cooker existence by finding the latter a flat on the coast – a move that may well have averted their deaths.

For Lucas, playing at the Theatre Royal has become something of an ambition.

“When we were at the Brighton Centre with Little Britain, we kept going past the Theatre Royal and everyone kept saying what a nice place it was. We were saying it looked really nice, but we were told we wouldn’t even be able to fit our set in there. But we’re really looking forward to coming to Brighton, it’s one of the most beautiful places in Britain.”

* Prick Up Your Ears will be at Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, from Monday until Saturday, September 12. Call the box office on 0844 8717650.