Lenny Henry proves to be an altogether gentler person the fourth time around

Having conquered Othello with Northern Broadsides, Lenny Henry is heading back to the stages of Yorkshire and Nick Ahad finds he’s a changed man.

I’ve had four attempts at shaking Lenny Henry by the hand.

Once when he announced that he would be taking on the title role in Northern Broadsides’ production of Othello, a second time when I interviewed him during rehearsals and later when he won an award for his performance. Each was embarrassing, his enormous hands crushing my own.

Today, when Henry meets to discuss his new stand-up show, Cradle to Rave, we finally crack it. From the off, Henry, who for a while seemed to be always accompanied by Northern Broadsides’ director Barrie Rutter, seems in less need to prove himself, the bone-crushing handshake replaced by something altogether gentler.

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Save for a tour manager, he is on his own and admits that, he is a changed man. In the first interview, back in 2009 when the comedian was rehearsing for the role of Othello, Henry was in hiding for almost a full hour. Hiding behind his beanie hat, behind passages of Shakespeare, behind his director, behind assertions that he was going to give Othello his “best shot”.

The project was a risk, but it paid off. Henry performed to a sell out West Yorkshire Playhouse audience for a month before taking Othello to London’s West End by popular demand. That same year he was named best newcomer at the London Evening Standard Theatre awards. Since we last met, he has also achieved grade three in piano, grade one classical jazz, has got halfway through a screenwriting MA, been divorced and returned to the one-man show format that first made him famous, with an entire new way of working.

“That year doing Othello changed me a lot,” says Henry, the deep baritone the one thing that has remained unchanged. “I was away from the family, having big thoughts. They’ve done MRI scans on people training to be London cabbies, before and after they do The Knowledge and their brains are just totally different. It was like I was doing The Knowledge when I worked with Barrie. I learnt to love the experience of taking in new information.

“I love being a comedian, but I’ve been doing it since I was 16. I think most people who have done something for 36 years might stop, go ‘hooray’ and move to Florida or take up glass blowing. I’m never going to not be – sorry, double negative – I’m always going to be a comedian, but there’s other stuff I want to do. This new show is a way of saying to people of a certain age that you can do anything.”

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It was worth three crushing handshakes to get to this Lenny Henry because, far from the intense and serious man who took on Othello, the Lenny Henry who is selling out Cradle to Rave across the country, a show which takes the audience through his life and the important part music has played in it, is the one the nation has known and loved for more than 30 years.

“There is an over-arching narrative,” he says, explaining that he’s putting into practice the lessons he learnt with Broadsides. “I used to have a structure that was best joke first, second best joke last and everything in between a bit of a lottery.

“I’m working with a director for the third time ever (he had a director on a previous one-man show, then Rutter, now award-winning Sam Buntrock). He is very strong dramaturgically – he’ll say to me, ‘yes, that’s very funny, but it does it give us anything in the story?’”

The show is already on the road and has been winning high praise from reviewers. One called it the “saddest and bravest show” Henry has ever done. It is sad because while the show is about Henry’s love of music, until recently his inability to play any musical instrument was something which caused much frustration. The love affair with music began as a child when his Jamaican parents would hold rent parties in their Dudley home, where neighbours would pay to party away the night enabling the Henrys to pay the rent.

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“The front room of a Jamaican household is somewhere you never go. Even if God came calling, you’d explain it was for best and put him in the kitchen.

“That was where my parents kept this enormous Blue Spot Blaupunkt Radiogram. It was so enormous I used to imagine that the house must have been built around it,” says Henry.

“They’d crank it up for these huge ‘shabeens’ where the house would smell of booze and curried goat and the adults would do inappropriate things like give kids Babycham (Henry slips into the Jamaican accent he always uses when impersonating his parents) ‘well it called Babycham, sound like it for kids’ and there’d be all these children wandering around bumping into the walls.

“We had a lot of Elvis and for some reason Jamaicans have always loved country and western. In my house there were pictures of Jesus and Elvis.”

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While audiences have seen Henry singing in character in shows like Live and Unleashed, the stand-up tour that made him a huge comedy name in the Eighties, he has always felt self-conscious about his lack of musical talent.

“I went to the local music teacher and asked him to teach me to play piano and he said that it was five shillings a lesson and I couldn’t afford it,” says Henry. “You think I’m going to say he taught me anyway aren’t you? He didn’t. The big tragedy of my life is that I love music and consume it, but I can’t play anything or converse with musicians. When I watch Bill Bailey, or Tim Minchin or Steve Martin, all comedians who are musos, I just think ‘curse them’. I don’t think I’ve got a very good voice. I can do impressions of other people singing but I’ve always had low self esteem about my voice.”

It is an issue he is finally addressing. Having spent the last year learning to play the piano, Cradle to Rave sees him play live each night. “It’s terrifying. Terrifying. But this is an age of challenge for me. To sit there and expose yourself as a learner and try to play is really difficult.

“I’ve learnt Fur Elise,” he adds, proudly. “I want to be able to play the middle bit from Sex Machine, or the piano solo from Doowutchyalike by Digital Underground or Chicken Grease by D’Angelo. Fur Elise is very Germanic. This is a mountain that I have to climb every night and sometimes I get to the foothills and have to stop and start again and struggle and scrape, but every night I get to the top and you can feel the audience willing you on.”

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The other major change in Henry’s life is that his marriage to Dawn French, one of the most enduring in British showbiz, has come to an end.

“My life has been about a lot of growth and change in the last few years. Some change is good, some weird. Being divorced is weird, but there’s great love between us and we continue to co-parent and continue to be good friends, so that’s a good thing. The biggest change in me is a thirst for knowledge, a love of creativity and a need to get off my backside and do different things. I don’t want to get stuck. Look what happened with Othello, I might have gone in there and bottled it. It was terrifying. I don’t know any novice actor who on opening night appeared on News at Ten. That was a massive pressure and I could have done without it. If I was rubbish it would have been dismissed as a massive case of hubris. It turned out OK.”

We shake hands. This time it turns out OK.

Lenny Henry: Cradle to Rave, Victoria Theatre, Halifax, April 14. Sheffield Lyceum, April 16. Grimsby Auditorium, April 28. York Grand Opera House, April 29.

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