Nina Conti interview: In Two Minds
To become popular through an obscure art form is surely not as easy as Nina Conti makes it look, but then the ventriloquist is never alone
Some years ago, during an interview, the actor Tom Conti outed his daughter as a ventriloquist. From the state of his eyebrows, he was plainly baffled but supportive. It would seem a leftfield choice for any parent – an antiquarian, out-of-time profession; like choosing to become a telegrapher, or one of those women who shove model troops across tables in old war films.
But, she's certainly made it work. Left a box of puppets in the will of her former lover, theatre director Ken Campbell, Nina Conti found her voice.
“I never wanted to be a ventriloquist. I thought I wanted to be an actress, but I was wrong. I always had much more interest in playing character parts, a girl in a bar for instance. Playing a lead just wasn’t... me. I wanted to create art, but I had no clue – I didn’t pick up a pen until I had a puppet.
“I remember when I first started I would make long videos just talking to myself, it was really fun – I found them again recently. It was when I started to think in dialogue rather than monologue that it began to work.”
The most astonishing thing about Conti's act is the complete separation of person and puppet, to the extent that you forget she’s on stage alone. Achieved, perhaps, because the puppets are not cartoonish, neither infantile nor grotesque, they’re instead little beings with 3D personalities.
Yet Conti and her puppets are two side of the same coin – ‘Nina’, when onstage, is demure and slightly neurotic, while her puppets are accented, rude and overbearing. They volley between each other, a divided self, the celebrated Monkey affecting a sardonic compulsion seemingly absent from his comedic partner.
“As a stand-up I needed more guile, and the puppets helped me. Something I’ve realised recently really is that I find it hard to ‘know’ anything – to have a strong opinion that’s unshakeable. Using the puppets allows me to stride between one thought and another without ‘knowing’.
“Monkey’s always in my head. It’s hugely liberating. I like saying the worst things, and then making it OK again. With Monkey, it’s in a place between irony and politics, so silly, so wild – he says the kind of things that Frankie Boyle might say, but I, Nina, never would – I’m just not that type."
Recently, Conti has added a new string to her bow, picking audience members to take part in the show, giving them masks, then improvising their voice and personality. Like a conjuror, she apparates life-size dummies and grants them five minutes of squirming discomfort.
“It doesn’t feel like a one-woman show. It’s less lonely. I remember touring with multi-puppet shows and coming into the dressing room afterwards, thinking back to what it was like doing shows with other people, and here am I, puppets splayed all over the room, and just all these marble eyes looking back at me – me, and a bunch of inanimate latex.
“Now when I come off the stage and I’ve been doing a show with the masks, and I look back at the night's show, I sometimes find myself laughing. ‘Wasn’t it funny when he said that?’ Except... I made him say it. I fool myself. But of course, they’re all human beings; a new person exists for that little while.”
Nina Conti: In Your Face, Pleasance Courtyard (The Grand), 3-29 Aug (not 16), 8pm, £10-17.50