Tim Crouch: I, Malvolio; My Arm; The Author

So says multi-award-winning actor and playwright Tim Crouch, as three of his plays come to his home town over the next six months.

Based in Cobden Road, in Brighton, Tim first turned his hand to writing after becoming tired of the acting world.

“At the moment I am able to work as a performer and writer, and the two things are working symbiotically,” he says from his Brighton home. “That process began when I sat down to write My Arm. The only acting I have done since then which wasn’t my own work was when I went to New York with Summerstock Theatre to do Uncle Vanya and The Tempest.

“I’m not in a world where I have an agent or have to go to terrible soul-destroying casting sessions where you feel like you’re a piece of meat.”

Tim is probably best known for his second play for adults – the two-hander An Oak Tree, which saw him work with a brand-new actor every night in a tale of a stage hypnotist and his volunteer.

The play earned Tim a Herald Angel in Edinburgh in 2005 and the best actor award at the Brighton Festival the following year. When An Oak Tree transferred Off-Broadway in New York for three months in 2006/7, among the actors who played opposite Tim were F Murray Abraham, Joan Allen and Mike Myers. All were working without the benefit of seeing a script, responding to Tim’s instructions either onstage as the hypnotist, through an ear-piece, or by sight-reading.

After appearing alongside Tim, Frances McDormand emailed him describing the intensity of the Oak Tree experience to injecting theatre straight into her veins.

His upcoming visits to Brighton will see him revisit where it all began, premiere a brand new work, and perform in among his audience in a unique stage set.

“It’s going to be lovely,” he says. “To be able to walk to work is kind of unheard of for me!”

I, Malvolio Pavilion Theatre, New Road, Brighton, May 7-9

For this year’s Brighton Festival Tim has been commissioned to create a new version of Shakespeare’s classic Twelfth Night as seen through the eyes of beleagured steward Malvolio.

“There are themes in Twelfth Night of madness and chaos, and order and discipline,” says Tim. “Malvolio sits in the middle of those themes.”

Malvolio is the character picked on and essentially bullied by some of the other characters in the play – not only made to believe that the Lady Olivia is in love with him, but also locked in a dark cellar and convinced he has gone mad.

As with Tim’s other character studies – I, Banquo based on Macbeth; I, Caliban concerning The Tempest ; and I, Peaseblossom about A Midsummer Night’s Dream – prior knowledge of the original play is not essential.

“When I was initially commissioned in 2003 to do I, Caliban, my initial impulse was to tell the story of Shakespeare’s play, but also for the play to be a free-standing piece of theatre in its own right,” says Tim.

As with his other Shakespeare-inspired pieces, I, Malvolio allows Tim to interact with his audience – something which got him into trouble back in 2004 when in character, during a school performance of I, Peaseblossom, he pretended to seduce a teacher.

“I was banned from all the Roman Catholic schools in Brighton,” he laughs.

“The front page of The Argus said ‘School Bans Shakespeare!’”

This run has an extra challenge, in that Tim will also be performing what is billed as an “adults only” version in the evenings.

“I’m very clear about where Malvolio can go ‘off-piste’,” says Tim. “All my plays are carefully written – I don’t just go into a group of people and improvise.

“Most of I, Malvolio is him interacting with you, as an audience.

“In Twelfth Night his nemesis is Sir Toby Belch. But when I play Malvolio my nemesis is you, the audience, who stand for all the anarchy and chaos represented in Twelfth Night by Sir Toby. Malvolio is a puritan – he has no time for theatre, he doesn’t understand the point of it.

“So for this play he has been double-whammied by the writer to perform in something he despises.”

For Tim the characters come first when he is planning his take on Shakespeare – no matter how minor they might have been in the original tale.

“Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream only has one word to say in the play – she just says ‘Ready’,” says Tim. “There is a great moment in I, Peaseblossom as we build up to that point.

“Malvolio leaves Twelfth Night with such incredible anger and energy. In the play he is imprisoned, ridiculed and his sanity is questioned. At the end, while everyone else gets married, he says: ‘I will be revenged on the whole pack of you’ and goes.

“I’m taking that energy and letting it be the beginning of my piece. He is just ranting for ten minutes at the start. There is a beautiful vicarious pleasure in seeing somebody p***** off and miserable.”

What makes Twelfth Night so different from Tim’s last Shakespeare commission, I, Banquo, is the sheer amount of plot.

“Macbeth is essentially about Macbeth, his plot runs straight through the story,” says Tim. “With Twelfth Night there is a huge profusion of about 12 plots – Olivia grieving for her brother, Orsino falling in love, the shipwreck, the twin brothers, Sir Toby Belch trying to needle Malvolio... It could take an hour to describe the plot in detail.”

As well as appearing at Brighton Festival 2010, I, Malvolio, is being premiered at several schools.

Once it leaves Brighton it will be performed at the Battersea Arts Centre, and the Singapore Arts Festival in a double bill with I, Peaseblossom, before joining Tim’s general repertoire.

“I always find it weird when theatres rehearse a play for three and a half or four weeks, then let the work run for just four weeks,” he says.

“My work goes into rep really – I am still doing the same plays I have been doing for the past seven years.”

* Family performances 6pm Fri and Sat, adults only 10pm Sat and Sun, tickets £10/£6. Call 01273 709709.

My Arm The Basement, Argus Lofts, Kensington Street, Brighton, Apr 16-17

My Arm was Tim Crouch’s first crack at writing a play, and the one which signalled the direction his career was going to turn.

“I wrote My Arm in a fevered five days in 2002,” he says. “I always talk about it as the mothership for all my work.”

My Arm is the story of a boy who, at the age of ten and for want of anything more meaningful to do, decides to raise his arm above his head and keep it there – for 30 years. In the intervening years he becomes a celebrated medical specimen and an icon of the New York art scene, but his family is torn apart.

Tim tells the story in an autobiographical style as a monologue, mixing in film specially created by Chris Dorley-Brown.

“There are three sequences of film, which are the only pieces of authenticity in the story,” says Tim. “They are shot in the locations that I talk about in the story, they are the concession to authenticity and literalism. At no point in my performance do I raise my arm.”

Objects brought in to the auditorium by the audience also play an important role in representing the different characters in the story.

“I try to make plays that can only be live,” says Tim. “They can’t be fixed or replicated.

“Theatre has to be responsive to where it is, when it is and the people it is in front of. An audience has to feel its presence is acknowledged, and has an impact on what happens.”

The two performances at The Basement take the play back to its intimate roots.

“When I first performed My Arm in 2003 it was in three front rooms before it opened officially in Edinburgh,” says Tim.

“When I perform in big spaces, such as when I took My Arm to a 300-seat theatre in Hong Kong, the actor in me has to come to the fore. I have to try to achieve that intimacy in a bigger space using all my technical skills.

“With a smaller more intimate space you don’t have to work so hard, which is always the best option. I don’t mean it in a lazy way, it’s just the audience doesn’t want to be shouted at, or acted at. I want to create an atmosphere of inclusivity.”

This weekend’s shows will be a particular treat for Tim. “I haven’t performed My Arm publicly in Brighton before, they have always been private salon performances,” he says.

“I feel quite sentimental about it.”

* Starts 7.30pm, tickets £8/£6. Call 01273 699733.

The Author Brighton Dome venues (tbc), Brighton, Wednesday, September 8, and Thursday, September 9

Tim's latest play focuses on the abuse carried out in the name of the spectator.

To underline this theme, the audience finds itself providing the stage for everything that unfolds, in a unique set of two banks of audience seating facing each other – with no gap in between.

At time of writing the show is set to come to one of the Dome’s theatre spaces in September as part of a national tour, following a successful opening in the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs last year.

“The play is consciously called The Author rather than The Audience, because the audience is the author,” says Tim.

“The big idea is that as spectators we are responsible for what we choose to look at in all its glory, and in all its terror.”

But anyone terrified of audience participation should not fear. “I’m not turning the searchlight onto the audience,” says Tim. “I’ve worked very hard to make sure the audience feels secure. They are lit beautifully, and we all sit together.

“I believe in audience participation in terms of being interactive, but not in terms of dragging someone onstage and making them look like an idiot. I want my work to be inclusive and warm, to bring them into an comfortable place. I don’t like being picked on myself as an audience member.”

Unlike the other two monologues, this play sees Tim joined by fellow actors Adrian Howells, Vic Llewellyn and Esther Smith to tell the story.