From Bretton Hall to Sherlock, Gatiss reveals all

I love actors. I take the Alan Bennett view of those who work in the other ‘oldest’ profession. The Leeds-born playwright calls actors ‘brave creatures’.

Bravery, it does have to be said however, doesn’t necessarily always make for a fascinating interviewee.

Actors, used to having words provided for them, sometimes – not always, but sometimes – falter when it comes to finding their own.

Not so actor Mark Gatiss who is appearing in a touring production of The Boys in the Band at West Yorkshire Playhouse next week. He has plenty to say.

Mind you, he does also add producer, director, writer and once upon a time owner of a reconstructed Victorian laboratory in his home to his CV.

The actor, who trained at Bretton Hall near Wakefield and is one of the four creative minds behind what he believes is the horribly prescient The League of Gentlemen, is a man of a sickeningly long list of talents.

Which entry on his CV best describes Gatiss?

He claims it’s not one that appears on the official version.

“Sexual athlete,” he says, immediately displaying the kind of wit that has made him as in demand for his writing of scripts as he is for his arch delivery of them on screen and stage.

Gatiss grew up in Durham as a bookish child, a cinephile who used to love reading plays and screenplays.

“I always wanted to be an actor, but I was always encouraged to also write from a very early age. It’s something I have always done in conjunction with acting, I consider it a really useful second string because I don’t have to sit around waiting for the work to arrive.”

The actor’s curse: waiting for the phone to ring.

Gatiss doesn’t have that problem, although it’s easy to wonder if he has the opposite issue – saying yes every time the phone rings and there is yet another interesting project being offered up.

Gatiss had his first taste of success in the mid-90s when he, along with Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson, all former Bretton Hall alumni, came up with the very odd BBC comedy The League of Gentlemen.

The series began as a stage show which the quartet took to the Edinburgh Fringe. From there it found its way on to radio and then in 1999 it arrived on TV on BBC2. Based on the kind of towns the four creators understood from their Northern upbringing, it tells of the characters of Royston Vasey, a Northern town which is very much a ‘local town for local people’.

Satirising a middle England attitude of a fear of foreigners and a distrust of anything that isn’t local, one wonders if it’s ripe for revival. The last series of the twisted comedy was on TV in 2002.

Gatiss says: “It’s funny, I get a lot of people cautiously asking me if we’ve thought about doing another series and I am quite happy to say quite directly that the answer’s yes. We all really want to do something together again set in Royston Vasey. It’s been well over a decade and we’re in the early stages of planning something. It will probably be a one-off, but it feels very much like the right time.

“If Michael Gove isn’t local than I don’t know who is.”

Gatiss thinks that if we wanted to see where the country was heading in 2016, all we had to do was look to the work he and the other ‘Gentlemen’ creators were making over a decade ago. It does now seem frighteningly prescient.

He says: “I think we stumbled on something all those years ago. ‘There’s nothing for you here’ seems to be the motto of the country in 2016.”

See? Gatiss has more to say than most. He isn’t saying much about Sherlock, the TV show which sees him write, executive produce and act as Benedict Cumberbatch’s brother Moriarty.

“We have to pinch ourselves,” says Matiss of the success of the TV show.

“Me and Steven (Moffat) came up with the idea on a train of updating Sherlock. In the original novels Dr Watson was invalided out of the army while fighting in Afghanistan and as soon as we discussed that, we knew it could be updated for an audience today.

“We couldn’t have had for a minute any idea of the global impact. It’s been 13 films in six years and the reach is amazing – people come from all over the world to the conferences we hold.

“It’s very humbling to have that reach.” It’s a kind of reach which allows Gatiss to pick and choose his projects.

Even though a new series of Sherlock, we now know, will be coming to the BBC in January, Gatiss is keeping busy with a tour of Mart Crowley’s ground-breaking play The Boys in the Band. The play, which originally opened in 1968 off-Broadway, changed the landscape of gay theatre and this is the first British revival in decades.

Gatiss, who is married to fellow cast member Ian Hallard, believes that, like The League of Gentlemen, this is a story ripe for revival.

We speak the week after a bill that would have wiped clean the criminal records of thousands of gay men, prosecuted when homosexuality was criminalised, was talked out of parliament by MP Sam Gyimah.

Gaytiss says: “Just because we have equal age of consent and gay marriage, doesn’t mean we have reached equality. We still live in a time where the prejudice of one person can sink an important and well-intentioned piece of legislation.”

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Gatiss is a man with plenty to say and you can hear his latest message at the West Yorkshire Playhouse next week. It’s bound to be fascinating.

It will be the first time Gatiss has been on stage at the theatre. It won’t, however, be his first visit. “I used to go all the time. It was an absolute oasis when I was completely on my uppers. I used to go there and spend the whole day nursing a cup of tea. Mainly because it was somewhere warm to go.”

The Boys in the Band is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, November 14 to 19.

Tickets on 0113 2137700. www.wyp.org.uk