Alan Stocks is one of Liverpool’s most easily recognised actors. His time in plays as diverse as Dead Heavy Fantastic, The Flint Street Nativity, Tartuffe and Scouse Pacific has made him a firm favourite with theatre audiences.

For the last few weeks he has been in the outstanding play by Joe Ward Munrow, Held, at The Liverpool Playhouse Studio Theatre with the superb Pauline Daniels and the inspiring Ged McKenna. Alan’s performance in the production is arguably the finest of his career to date. Alan will soon be seen in the musical Mam! I’m ‘Ere! at The Dome alongside Stephen Fletcher, Eithne Browne, Drew Schofield, Helen Carter, Rachel Rae, Paul Duckworth and Keddy Sutton.

In the final part of an interview with Liverpool Sound and Vision, Alan talks of the play at the Dome, his love of acting in Liverpool and a sneaking regard for Shakespeare’s Iago.

 

Talking of great casts, you are going from one production straight into another at The Dome for Mam! I’m Ere!

“A marvellous cast! One of the best ensembles with Stephen Fletcher, Drew Schofield, Ethine Browne, Paul Duckworth, Helen Carter, Keddy Sutton, Rachel Rae… all great mates and great friends. We have talked for ages. I remember being in the Everyman Bistro with Stephen Fletcher with him saying to me, what we need to do with such talent and we need to go out and we need to get this done and we need to just do it. Three years later we are doing it. Not only that but he has done two two- handers in the meantime which have been great. So he knows that it is possible and he deserves the credit. He has put done a script and some of the best voices I have ever heard all in one room, some you might not even know as he has had some friends come in as vocal divas. For some tunes you just have six women giving it all and it’s just brilliant. So you have that and then the old guard.”

Has to be said that Keddy is the funniest woman in Liverpool right now!

Keddy is absolutely hilarious actually. It is something different though. We are writing the thing, we are directing each other and it isn’t that easy. It certainly isn’t guaranteed, the ticket sales are so important. For us it’s the difference between going to another show and not doing one. We have all put our oar in and we are doing what we can and it will be great. It is a family show; you can bring a ten year old to this and have no problem at all with the language, so it is different in that sense. Some people may feel they may have lost a bit of the smutty humour, we may have but come to the bar afterwards and me and Drew will do 20 minutes for you (laughs). We are trying very hard to have real characters, it is a romance, there is comedy in there but it is a romance and there is great singing and great dancing. We are working very hard and we are doing something. We just hope that enough people come so that we can then do something else.”

Aside from Held or Mam! I’m Ere!, has there been a play that has been your personal favourite?

“I’ve been very proud of the plays I have done here. It’s different though because it’s like asking what do you like best bacon or hamburgers, I love them both. I really enjoyed doing Dead Heavy Fantastic, a very good play and of course I had a really good role in it, but I was with Stephen Fletcher, Helen, a really good gang of people, Con O’ Neil who is a lovely guy. So I loved that; so after years of playing small parts at Croydon or the R.S.C. or wherever I was, suddenly…I say suddenly, very slowly, all of the Liverpool theatres that I had re-introduced myself to started going, go on then have a go, well done, now have a go at this.

When Gemma Bodinetz calls you up and says I am directing something and I would like you in that, it is a seal of approval for everything you’ve done before.”

Gemma is a very generous woman, a generous director.

“Gemma is an absolutely that, so astute and so clever. She really knows what she wants and a very clear idea of what she wants doing in a play. She doesn’t do anything that she can’t say I will tell you why. A Streetcar Named Desire, Moliere…she will tell you why that is why it is important and I love working with her, I love her death. I loved doing the Flint Street Nativity because Tim Firth is an old friend of mine and I did one of his first plays called The End of the Food Chain over the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. So it was lovely to see him again and get a crack out of a musical version of that.”

You were the Innkeeper in that weren’t you? The way you come out from behind the inn at the end of the first act, even though it was superbly funny was a very powerful moment for you. It was up there with Andrew Schofield’s version the year before.

“(laughs) Well If I can compete with Drew I am happy. I didn’t get to see Drew’s version. I auditioned for it but my agent phoned me and said it has gone to another actor called Drew Schofield so I put the phone down and thought fair enough. Of course the Innkeeper, he lives in a pub so you get that, whole my house smells of beer, my house smells of cigarettes and all that, so he hasn’t had an easy childhood and he is in love with Mary completely. You can’t play washy colours with that, it has to be definite. Where he sees Mary and Joseph and says you can come in but YOU can sod off…it’s a great line.”

The playhouse has an incredible tradition for its Christmas shows but to get The Flint Street Nativity back two years on the trot shows something.

“Helen Carter again, a fantastic actress, an excellent voice, she is a gem that woman. Why she is not a massive star is beyond me, I’m sure she will be at some point but she is just so good and in what we are doing now she is just brilliant.

She is good friends with Stephen and she has helped a lot with the design of the show, she is an amazing artist, she has done pictures of the lions but asleep at night, they are phenomenal and because we are playing to our strengths, she has been staying behind designing things and making props and the set.”

Paul Duckworth is in the play with you and you have also worked together before and he also arguably had his career defining moment of the year at the Unity in Waiting for Brando.

“Paul Duckworth is brilliant; when he is in the zone he is breath-taking. He is full on is Paul, if you say let’s do this show and chip in, then you are in trouble because he will never stop chipping in. He is brilliant. Again you do feel a bit guilty going to work by the cathedral in a room with all your mates. There is no boss there, well there is in Stephen but he doing the funny voices as well.”

It is an image I want to see, Stephen doing his voices and Keddy doing her Dorothy at the same time.

“Every day of the week, she does Dorothy every day I think (laughs) bit of Dorothy, bit of Cilla.”

Is there a part you would have dearly loved to have played on stage?

“Iago, Iago and Henry V but I now I will never get to play him, there’s a chance I might play Iago…you never know. I read two Shakespeare’s for my O’ Levels, one of them was Julius Ceaser, possibly my favourite play of all time, and the other was Othello and just to see a character…because I didn’t quite understand the language at the time but I was trying to understand it more and to find out what a sneak he was, this guy keeps saying I am going to mess him up now and ever since then I have thought, Give us a go at that. He has a couple of great speeches in it.”

Having met your wonderful family they seem very supportive of you. How do you find that as an actor?
“Do you know what, my wife is very supportive of me. My wife met me when were teenagers and she chucked me. When I got into RADA she took me to West Derby and said I’m finishing with you. She said you just need a link to Liverpool and I can’t be it. Quite dramatic really! I went off and went to live with three nurses in South London as you do and she turned up a year later at my squat with a bag full of leotards saying I just got into Goldsmiths, can I live with you. What you going to say to that., 18 and with a bag of tights, so we have never looked back since then really. She stopped dancing about a year later as there was contemporary dance so she went back to university here, got her qualification and now she is a teacher here.

She is a hard mistress though, she doesn’t take any c**p. I ask her shall I do this job, she will ask me if it pays well and I will say yes so she says do it then. What do you think of this? Well it’s alright. She is real leveller. The kids, that’s a bit strange as when they were younger I was doing a lot of television and they would come and see me on location a I would be away for months on end. Of course they are grown up now and acting is probably odd because their mates find it odd. Their best friends mum’s come and see me regularly and say I’m Ann’s mum and hiya but it’s not what their dads do because they get their hands dirty. It’s not a thespian family but it works very well.

Ian D. Hall