‘I fell in love from within a monkey suit and was scared to leave’

Nina Conti is the country’s, and her new film about a woman falling in love from within a monkey suit is her most personal work yet.

If you’re not familiar with her work, the 50-year-old rocketed to comedy stardom with the help of Monkey, her undiplomatic, swearing, male puppet who she’s shared the stage with for 20 years now.

‘Monkey is more me than I am,’ Nina tells Metro.co.uk while chatting about her directorial debut in Sunlight and her – gulp – fully-improvised show.

Gesturing out of shot on Zoom, Nina explains how there are four monkey puppets behind her printer, wedged in by lamps to stop them from toppling to their death.

‘There’s a functional element to it, and then there’s a deeply personal connection there as well,’ she says.

‘I do fully know I control the monkey, but I also think the monkey at some point took its own wings.’

Ventriloquism wasn’t always on the cards for Nina, who worked as an actor when strong-minded theatre maverick Ken Campbell convinced her to give it a go as part of his grand plan to bring the art form back.

‘What I don’t always remember, and rarely mention, is that I tried ventriloquism for a bit and thought: “That’s bloody awful. I’m never going to do that,”‘ Nina admits.

But then in the quiet of her own home, Nina returned to it, filming herself on a little video camera.

‘It suddenly spoke back to me and was a lightbulb moment,’ she remembers. ‘I watched it back and I almost got goosebumps. I hadn’t been aware how living the puppet seemed.’

Her new show – Nina Conti: Whose Face is it Anyway? – which is at the Edinburgh Fringe throughout August, sees Nina in total improvised free-fall.

Instead, Nina has made her own cartoon half-face masks, the mouths of which she controls, and plonks on brave audience members who join her on stage. Then, she just sees what happens.

‘I work visually off what the audience member looks like as best I can,’ she explains. ‘So I really just try to look at the person and think you might talk like this.

‘I guess people have played that game where you turn the sound down on a nature program and voice the animals. Or maybe no one has played that game,’ she laughs. ‘But it’s a bit like that.’

Unusually for someone who performs on stage for a living, Nina admits she has always been shy, and she thinks this is what allows her to thrive as a ventriloquist.

‘I was secretly funny to people that knew me well,’ Nina says of growing up. ‘But I was shy, so I didn’t get my funny out at parties, really.’

Nina used to feel ‘ashamed’ of all her on-stage props that made up her shows, but now she is thankful for them.

‘I’d think I’m obviously not a very integrated human if I’m needing all this kit,’ she admits.

‘Thank goodness I didn’t know how to express myself well because everything else grew, which I’m grateful for.’

The on-stage disguise is a relief for Nina – a feeling that somewhat translates to her real life, too.

‘There’s something about being shy which I think has really led to the film I’ve just made as well, which is about a woman who prefers to live in a monkey suit,’ she says.

Sunlight is a dark comedy and love story about a road trip taken by the woman (played by Nina) who lives in a monkey suit, and a man called Roy, played by Shenoah Allen.

Nina’s partner Allen co-wrote it with her over five years. It’s Nina’s most personal – and I sense most precious – piece of work to date.

‘It’s so personal I can’t even begin to describe,’ she says in the tone of someone about to hide behind their sofa – something it seems as though she will likely be tempted to do on August 17 when it premieres in Edinburgh.

‘It came from when I was doing a stage act with Shenoah Allen. We did a little double act where I was wearing the monkey suit and he was playing a character called Roy. We did that at comedy clubs, and there was this really good chemistry between monkey and Roy, and I thought, really naturally, a love story could evolve out of this,’ Nina explains.

‘I thought if I was falling in love with you – which I happened to be – from within this monkey suit, I would be scared to come out, because I’d be a let down after monkey is so funny and liberated. I can’t possibly seduce [him] from within.

‘It all just seemed like a love story with a very definite barrier in the way, a kind of Beauty and the Beast gone wrong, when there’s absolutely no desire for the person to become a human again.’

It also took a long time to make because Nina has been at war with the industry to make it happen.

‘I had to fight so hard against the industry, telling me I couldn’t direct it, telling me it wasn’t fundable, all these things. And so I ended up getting all the money myself through letter writing to like theatre producers and stuff like that,’ she shares.

‘It made me mad but it galvanised me.’

Nina is clearly a fighter: she was after all on stage in the years when stand-up comedy meant a load of white men telling jokes for each other and often at the expense of everyone else. So for Nina to get on stage and be so bold to a) be a woman, and b) be a ventriloquist, it took some pluck.

Was that why Nina made monkey a man?

‘It wasn’t even very conscious, but unconsciously, I was devising a voice that would cut through a little bit further,’ she reflects.

‘It’s also funny, because I posted a clip the other day where Monkey calls me a wh**e and an a**hole because I am just standing there not moving my lips. If you psychoanalyse it, you think, good lord what is this internalised misogyny?

‘But I think I was saying all those things because if I say them first, I own the space, and then if anybody calls out “sl*t” then they’ll be late, because Monkey has already said it.

‘So, yeah, I think it was a weapon in a male-dominated environment, in a way, or shield. Or both.’

While Monkey sometimes has a dark side, it’s hard to imagine where Nina would be without her foul-mouthed shadow.

‘I don’t know, I might have found a voice without the puppet,’ she says, trailing off and thinking.

‘No, I’d have found some other disguise or contort myself for sure. But I might have been moving my lips.’