Nina Conti
How Monkey has helped me cope
Nina Conti is in her north London kitchen just days before she takes up residency at the Edinburgh Festival. Every day throughout August, she will strap half-masks on to the faces of a succession of audience members, manipulating the false mouths to make it appear that they’re talking. Their bodies may be corkscrews of embarrassment, but the spectacle manages to be both very, very funny and strangely touching. And much of that, of course, is down to Nina.
Today, the 42-year-old only child of actors Tom Conti and Kara Wilson is by turns jolly and jittery. “Is it any wonder,” she jokes, “that I ended up talking to puppets?”
Initially, she resisted following her parents into the profession. “It felt so unoriginal, although I could see they were having lots of fun and lots of foreign travel.”
In a nod to being sensible (her words), she opted to read philosophy at Norwich rather than go to drama school. A face-splitting grin. “But what can you do with philosophy except become a ventriloquist?”
First, though, she took up acting. She was with the RSC in Stratford for a couple of years. “I toyed with changing my surname because it’s so distinctive but, in the end, I thought that would have been a bit shirty, somehow.”
One of her life’s defining moments – and the reason she took up ventriloquism in the first place – was a chance meeting with Ken Campbell, the late theatre maverick. Stationary at traffic lights in Hampstead one day, Nina spotted him, crossed the road and leant in through his car’s window to tell him she thought he was amazing. Flirty Ken returned the compliment, and so began a friendship that briefly flowered into a love affair. Nina was in her midtwenties; Ken was pushing 60.
What on earth did her parents make of this unusual, some might say unsuitable, union? “Oh, they knew how important he was to me,” she says. “He was a sort of alien genius.” Even so, it must have come as something of a shock when their daughter, in her highly personal 2012 BBC documentary, A Ventriloquist’s
Story: Her Master’s Voice, is suddenly “asked” by her hand-puppet, Monkey, if it was no more than coincidence that he came into her life when she was getting over an abortion…
“I considered editing that bit out of the film,” she says, “but, without it, what remained didn’t quite make sense.” She’s never revealed the identity of the baby’s paternity. Is it fair to assume it was Ken? “Oh, that’s personal,” she says, although she will neither confirm nor deny it.
It was Campbell who bought Conti her first ventriloquism kit. “He always maintained I didn’t want to expose myself as me, that I wanted to hide behind buck teeth or a false ass. It’s why he encouraged me to learn what amounts to vocal acrobatics. The man was a visionary.”
Like a lot of people, she was initially repelled by the idea. “Ventriloquism? That’s that weird stuff that isn’t funny. And yes, slightly creepy – although, come to think of it, that didn’t put me off. Creepy’s quite interesting.”
To remind herself that it was a terrible idea, Nina made a short home video of her “venting” with a couple of puppets. “Then I watched it back and I thought: ‘Oh my, I’m rather good at this.’” Ken was excited, too, by what he saw, and promptly wrote her a oneact play. “He was in it – offstage, in the loo throughout. I supplied his voice.”
Campbell altered her destiny, she says. “I became his disciple. Now there’s nothing I won’t do [on stage]. I’m completely uninhibited. But then, even if I’m just with Monk onstage, I never feel I’m on my own.”
“Monk” – her pet name for her malevolent and most famous handpuppet who is forever torpedoing Nina’s niceness with querulous putdowns – has a central role in her latest show, as master of ceremonies. “He’s unaccountable. His instincts are very raw. I never know what’s going to come out of his mouth. For instance, he allows me to be very rude, sometimes rather lewd, with other women, something I would never be in real life.”
Her father is amazed that Nina works entirely without a script. “He says it’s an actor’s worst nightmare. But then, he wouldn’t play charades at Christmas; he said he was too embarrassed. It’s not frightening to me, though. I’m a sort of narrator. I simply say what I see. But I do tend to sabotage myself a bit if my parents come and watch me, although ‘His instincts are very raw – I never know what’s going to come out of his mouth’ they’re very supportive.” Even so, Tom Conti is a man of strongly held opinions which he’s not afraid to share. Exercised about the standard of teaching in the UK, he sought an interview with the then education secretary.
More recently, he announced himself as a Brexiteer – to the chagrin of his liberal Hampstead neighbours.
Nina groans. “I was getting worried, but then I’ve been very concerned recently about a lot of his political views. I’ve detected a distinct slide to the Right. I was convinced he was going to vote Leave. On that awful Friday morning when the result came through, I phoned him up and more or less shouted: ‘How do you feel now?’ He told me to calm down. In the end, he said he’d voted Remain.”
Nina is married to comedian Stan Stanley, currently on a four-week summer course at IO, “a highly regarded improv school in Chicago”. What’s life like for two comics over the cornflakes each morning? “It’s good,” she says, “because we ‘get’ each other.” They have two sons: Drummond is 12, Arthur five.
As to her future, Nina is very interested in the documentary form and is making three of them. Two are to do with particular comedians – Simon Munnery and US comic Philip Burgers’s alter ego, Dr Brown – and one all about monogamy.
Her parents’ marriage has been referred to as “open” although she prefers to describe it as “French”. And her own beliefs? “No comment whatsoever,” says Nina, all of a sudden uncharacteristically tight-lipped.
Where’s Monkey when you need him?
Nina Conti: In Your Face is at the Pleasance Grand, Edinburgh (Aug 3-29), and the Criterion Theatre, London (Sept 7-17), before starting a national tour. Tickets: ninaconti.net/live