“I trained at the Xaverian Fathers in Coatbridge,” Paul Higgins explains. “Wait. Did you mean the priesthood or acting?”
Good question. We’ve been discussing the 44-year-old actor’s playwriting debut, a dark comedy about a trainee priest losing his faith and returning from the seminary to find his Glaswegian family falling apart.
Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us is one of four pieces by new writers co-produced by the Traverse and National Theatre of Scotland for this month’s Traverse Debuts season. It reunites Higgins with the NTS’ director of new work John Tiffany, who directed him as the writer and sergeant, killed by a Iraqi suicide bomber, in the original production of the internationally acclaimed Black Watch.
We’re in a bar in Glasgow’s Merchant City. Higgins has the day off from filming Hope Springs for BBC Scotland, a comedy-drama about four female criminals hiding in a remote village. He plays the local policeman, caught in a love triangle between his fiancé, played by Ronni Ancona, and the gang’s leader, played by Alex Kingston. “It’s got scenery, romance, comedy, dismemberment and murder,” he says approvingly. “It’s very ambitious.”
Breaks like today will afford him the chance to watch Tiffany conduct rehearsals. “We’re quite different,” he explains, “and I hope we complement each other. John did an astonishing job with Black Watch.
“I never thought it would be the most successful show I’d ever been in. Quite the reverse. Cammy being carried around as he narrated the history of the regiment was always a disaster in rehearsals and I remember saying to Brian Ferguson, ‘when are they going to cut this?’ He felt the same way. And then we did it before an audience and they went wild. Actors can get very tied up in their own characters and John is quick to remind you what the audience is feeling.”
Raised in Wishaw by an atheist father and Catholic mother, Higgins left the priesthood at 17 when it was discovered he’d been seeing a girl. Yet Catholicism won’t leave him. He sees Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us as a portrayal of “a typical working-class British family. But obviously it’s Catholic all over, those notions of God and guilt”.
For viewers of the BBC’s The Thick Of It, he will always be Jamie, the psychotic lieutenant of Peter Capaldi’s fearsome spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant political satire. Like the man playing him, Jamie spent five years taking holy orders, but somewhere along the way he learned to fight by “Motherwell Rules”, which involves the insertion of a pint glass and two pool cues in opposing ends of some unfortunate’s body.
“That was a bit naughty,” he smiles wanly. “Jamie hadn’t trained to be a priest until Peter brought it up during an improvisation. So it’s a bit of a joke really that just ended up staying in.
“We never worked out their history. But I like to think they met on the Daily Record and when Malcolm got into government, he brought Jamie with him.”
“We never worked out their history. But I like to think they met on the Daily Record and when Malcolm got into government, he brought Jamie with him.”
With his intense blue eyes, you can imagine the zeal with which Higgins pursued his original vocation and why he sought “to be a missionary rather than a parish priest.
“I wanted to go out and save the world” he says evenly.
“When people discover I went to a seminary, they often ask me about abuse,” he explains. “But my experience was the exact opposite of that. Like Patrick says in the play, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, certainly up to that point. I really didn’t want to leave and it had more to do with girls than it does for Patrick. But the doubts grew, like tectonic plates pushing against each other. Something had to give.”
I ask how he summoned the necessary fury for lines written by The Thick Of It’s ‘swearing consultant’ Ian Martin, as in one notorious scene, when Jamie’s fondness for Al Jolson is unwisely mocked and met with a tsunami of foul, four-letter abuse.
“I’m afraid that terrible rage comes easy to me,” he laughs. “They say I was smiling as I said it. I couldn’t care about Al Jolson, but in that moment I cared deeply about him.”
He reprises his role as Jamie in In The Loop, the big screen, transatlantic adaptation of the series out in cinemas next May, starring James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander and Steve Coogan alongside members of the original cast. In one instance of pique, Jamie reportedly “kicks a very large fax machine to pieces”.
“I have a speech, I don’t know if it’s still in, about the film There Will Be Blood. Jamie’s really disappointed because there’s ‘no fucking blood’ in it.”
As Black Watch’s sergeant, he sang from the hymn sheet, addressing his soldiers’ grumbles with an unequivocal “it’s our turn tay be in the shite”. And in In The Loop, Jamie is likewise just following orders.
“Our job is to sell whatever the Prime Minister wants us to sell,” he explains. “If Jamie was asked to be anti-war, he would be rabidly anti-war, whatever’s required. So long as it’s rabid. The line is that this unnamed other country is a real and immediate threat to ours and documents are manipulated to back that up. Things that don’t back it up are left out. That appears pretty much what actually went on.”
Having been in Black Watch though, which was directly based on squaddies’ testimony, the actor could never be so uncritical as his onscreen realpolitk Rottweiler.
“I’m hesitant to say this because of how it would look out of context, but it made me believe in national service for everybody,” he says. “If the children of the English middle-class had been going abroad to die, I don’t believe we’d ever have gone. I never thought I would think that. I don’t believe in national service to knock sense into young people, but if you’re going to have an army it should be representative of the country. There shouldn’t be any cannon fodder.”
Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us echoes this sense of limited opportunities for the working-class.
“I started writing it about five years ago,” he recalls. “I’d been talking to somebody about my dad and the extraordinary way that he spoke, very elliptical and with rhetorical questions. When he wanted to he had a fantastic vocabulary. I just started to try and write him really.
“He was the age I am now and must have been horribly frustrated. He quoted poetry a lot, as he does in the play. In another generation he would have been another person. But as it was he was an alcoholic labourer.”
Despite an increased number of stage appearances in Scotland recently, as a young Prospero in the 2006 production of The Tempest at the Tron and in the NTS production of David Grieg’s Damascus at the Traverse in 2007, Higgins has lived in London for more than 25 years after graduating from the Central School of Speech and Drama. He met his wife, former Coronation Street actor Amelia Bullmore in a 1992 production of A View from the Bridge in Manchester.
“That was very, very tricky,” he recalls. “I’d already fallen for her by then. But I couldn’t tell her because we were playing lovers and I thought if I asked her out and she said ‘no’, it would fuck it up completely. So I was torn between declaring myself and just getting on with the play.”
He feigns regret that their two daughters wish to follow their career path. But he hopes “to help them do whatever they want and not be prescriptive.
“Besides, where people start out in life is not necessarily where they end up.”
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