Nina Conti has been appearing at the Edinburgh fringe since 2003. Her new show, In Your Face, takes her ventriloquist act in to new territory by using audience members with masks as “live puppets”.
Your show consists of improvisation, ventriloquism and audience participation – three of the scariest forms of performance. Are you drawn to the adrenalin of not knowing what happens next?
No, I was terrified of it all of my professional life until I started doing it, and I realised improv is really to do with responding. It was through studying clowning that I came to it. I’ve always been a bit of a thrill-seeker in terms of doing bungee jumps and stuff like that, but in terms of performance, no. I stuck to a script for 12 years with that monkey.
Where did the idea for a fully improvised show start?
I used my audience masks in a previous show, and the first time I did it I paid a stooge – now it feels insanely cowardly that I did that, I can’t believe I did it. I can only tell people about it now. But it was untourable with the stooge so I started to risk it with real audience members and found it was much funnier. So then I always looked forward to the mask bit, and it got longer and longer until I decided to do a whole show. I like the fact that it’s collaborative and everybody’s on the journey together – it’s not just one person showing they’re clever.
What’s the most alarming thing that’s happened on stage with this show?
There was one guy who just shouted very loudly from behind the mask – he either didn’t care or thought he could be funnier than what I was saying, so in the end I just sat down in the audience and let him talk. That was a scary one but very funny.
What was your first experience of the Edinburgh fringe?
It was the summer I’d learnt ventriloquism. Ken Campbell wrote a show for me called Let Me Out – “a one-woman X-rated ventriloquial farce”, was how he described it. It was so ambitious - there were 10 different voices running concurrently, I had people living in my nose and my arse, there were spirits and puppets. The end was a complete explosion that took so much rehearsal… and then I got here and there were seven people in the audience. The ratio of work to audience here can just make no sense at all – that’s part of the fringe.
But that experience prompted your move into comedy?
Yes, because Monkey had been in that play, and it was definitely my favourite puppet. I did a little spot on Nicholas Parsons’s show with Monkey and got a few laughs, and thought: maybe I could do standup with this. So I signed up for a comedy night when I got back to London. It was only when I started doing it as standup that it felt much more exciting and liberating. But I thought it would last for a summer, not 12 years and still growing and changing.
You’ve been in films and made documentaries with your puppets – what’s next?
There’s a book in the pipeline – it’ll be a partly fictional autobiography in two voices, mine and the monkey’s. But with this show I do have a hope that it could run and run, because I’m having so much fun with it, and it’s different every time. I’m hoping people will want to come again and sit in the front row if they’re feeling brave.
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Nina Conti: In Your Face is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 9pm daily until 30 August
