Rory Bremner is in a hurry. The controversial impersonator surges into his production office a few minutes late for our meeting. ‘So sorry. Did they tell you? We overran,’ he says in his light, energetic voice. ‘Won’t be a sec. Got to go to the loo. Ooh! Too much information.’ A few minutes later he reappears and sits patiently while I fiddle with the wrong buttons on the tape machine. ‘Quick soundcheck?’ ‘Testing, testing,’ he says helpfully. And we begin.
I’m keen to talk about comedy, politics, his work as a satirist, the infamous Margaret Beckett tapes — about absolutely anything other than our designated topic, Bertolt Brecht, whose earliest play Bremner has translated for the Young Vic’s alarmingly titled ‘Big Brecht Fest’. I kick off with a topical question. ‘As a satirist, would you prefer a coronation or a contest for the Labour leadership?’ He leaps on one word in particular. ‘I’m very wary, you’d be surprised to hear, very wary indeed of describing myself as a satirist. First and foremost we’re comedians who engage with what’s going on. We do topical comedy.’
With no prompting he then delivers an analysis of the Brown accession which develops into an examination of the role of satire within the body politic. ‘There’s a kind of irony that Gordon Brown has waited such a long time and that his inheritance has been so poisoned by his association with Blair’s policies on Iraq. And I mean with Blair, with all the criticism of Blair, the satire if you like, far from being the counter-culture, is now so embedded in the culture that we’re in danger of not taking anything seriously at all. Do we have a role in that?’ He puts this question to himself. ‘I always say we’re a sceptical programme. But it’s not f***-you satire, it’s a synthesis of intelligence and humour.
‘People don’t watch our show because they hate politics but because they enjoy it and want to engage in it. I mean, during the Iraq thing, what was weird was that we had researchers and Arabists and various Foreign Office contacts and experts in chemical and biological weapons who were all saying this was a disastrous policy. And it was dreamed up by a very small group,’ and here his demeanour shifts fractionally and his prose becomes more structured, as if recalling a newspaper article, ‘…within a few blocks of each other in Washington who decided, just as al-Q’aeda hijacked the jets on September 11th, that they were going to hijack American foreign policy. We’re living now with the consequences of a hijacking, not of a few jets but of an entire foreign policy by a few neoconservatives. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, of course. It can’t be a theory because they put it into practice. And it can’t be a conspiracy because they were perfectly open about it. Um, so we all…’ and he shifts back into conversational mode, ‘we became fascinated about that and our audiences went up from a million-and-a-half or two million to about three million.
‘That’s not because people are cynical it’s because there were two commentaries going on. The news and then a couple of days later our show was doing its level best to run a sort of satirical, um, in that sense, a kind of satirical counter, er, a counter-argument to the war.’ He seems to be struggling for a word here. Or to avoid a word. ‘We were a sort of comic Newsnight,’ he says. But even that definition dissatisfies him and I suspect he’d happily spend hours pondering the infinitesimal gradations of meaning between satire, topical comedy, analysis, political dissent, and so on.
There’s a broad donnish streak in him and it comes to the fore when we finally turn to Brecht. A Respectable Wedding, which Bremner has translated, was originally called ‘The Wedding’. ‘But being Brecht he revised it later and gave it a new title meaning “The Petit Bourgeois Wedding”. But that would hardly get people flocking to the theatre.’
‘Unless they were Brecht fans,’ I suggest. ‘Maybe, but the play began as an experimental working-out of his instinctive disdain for middle-class conventionality. And between the first draft and the second he got a taste for communism, and he put Marxist flesh on the bones of his dislike of middle-class hypocrisy. And it wasn’t just a wedding, it was a particular society, the Weimar Republic, that he was satirising, essentially …’ And on he ruminates cerebrally, technically, endlessly. He’d certainly shine at high table.
While Bremner anatomises Brecht I anatomise Bremner. As he gets older he looks more and more like Paddy Ashdown circa 1992. The same action-man physique, the same square skull sprouting tufts of ginger hair, and the same likeable countryish face with those over-small eyes that react to a question by crinkling up in well-intentioned helplessness as if locating a point on the horizon where a yacht has just capsized. ‘This particular wedding party,’ he continues, ‘is a group of people who are trying to behave in a certain conventional polite formalised way, and during the course of the play all the relationships disintegrate and the veneer of respectability is eroded and at the same time the furniture falls apart which is a metaphor for…’ The tape cuts out. I hope that’s not a metaphor for anything.
I flip it over and the interruption breaks his flow. He apologises, charmingly, for spouting so many facts. I change the subject. ‘So. About the Margaret Beckett tapes.’ A chill descends as I mention the secretly recorded phone conversation in which Bremner, posing as Gordon Brown, elicited indiscreet comments from Mrs Beckett about her Cabinet colleagues. ‘You decided against broadcasting,’ I pester. Short pause. ‘There was a regulatory issue,’ he says tersely. Then he brightens. ‘I’ve decided to give up justifying myself for Lent; I mean you either have a sense of humour about these things or not. A lot of people didn’t. And it was remarkable how the political journalists took sides. I’ve been getting lectures in ethics from Andrew Gilligan. I enjoyed that! And you realise these people spend their lives in the lobbies picking up gossip, speculation and rumour, behind-the-arras stuff, but if a Channel 4 comedy show does it, they hate it. It’s their patch.’ ‘Yours as well,’ I suggest. ‘You’re a commentator.’
That’s the word he was struggling for — or against — earlier. His small eyes crinkle up and he shudders theatrically. ‘John Bird would rather stab me to death than hear me describe what we do as comment.’ But ‘comment’ is precisely what they do. Come on, Rory. A comedy show with weapons researchers, Arabists and Foreign Office contacts? And that speech about the neocon hijackers? Face it, mate. You’re a commentator. Better fetch the stab-jacket.
The Brecht double bill at the Young Vic runs from 29 March to 14 April.
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