Mordor Than A Feeling

Next month Canadian comic Charlie Ross is in Dublin to do his one-man performance of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, having previously enjoyed huge success with his (Han) solo take on the Star Wars canon. When did he first get the idea to stage these unique kind of shows?

“It came up slowly,” responds Ross, talking from Washington DC, where demand for his LOTR show has earned him a theatre residency. “I didn’t suddenly wake up in the middle of the night with the idea. I didn’t like having to audition, even though that’s what actors have to do. But I thought, ‘There’s got to be a way to gain control over your own destiny.’ So it seemed like writing something for myself would be the way to go, and a one-person show is great, because you only have to look after yourself. I knew there were a couple of rules I had to follow if I was going to do a fringe-type show,
“I knew it had to be something nice and light, with a hook, so that it would attract people. With Star Wars, it seemed to have that kind of hook, and at first it was a 35-minute show I did in some comedy clubs. It went really well, so it was expanded to an hour, and it was at that point that I started to tour it properly. Slowly but surely it picked up.”
As Ross’s comedic take on Star Wars became increasingly successful, did he ever enjoy an audience with the franchise’s creator, George Lucas?
“I’ve never met him, and maybe that’s a good thing,” muses Ross. “Only because I had a friend who met him, and who had built it up in his life to be this monumental moment. He was working for Jim Henson years and years ago, and he hoped that when he met George Lucas, that Lucas would realise that he was a magnificent guy, and that he would say, ‘Come work for me.’ It didn’t happen and he was very crushed by it. I think that if George Lucas ever met me knowing what I do, I’d be a bit of a curiosity to him.”
Ross must have been pleasantly surprised when the show became a hit.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he responds. “I was doing the show even when I couldn’t get 30 people to come and see it. It’s still the same performance when I do a Star Wars convention and there are thousands of people in attendance. I don’t know, it really casts a strange light on the idea of success. If what you’re doing is good quality, and you’re in it for the long haul, the world will sometimes catch up with you and realise that what you’re doing is worthwhile.
“I’ve become a big advocate for people who are great artists or actors or whatever, who seem to be going through the slog of trying to sell their work, and perhaps aren’t meeting with the success they deserve. I always tell them, ‘You have to stick with it, because it’s so worth it when you’re on the other side.’”
Ross reckons that performing Lord Of The Rings is more of a physical challenge than Star Wars.
“There are all these giant battle scenes in those films,” he notes. “They’re not so much spaceship battles as humans and monsters. There’s also a hell of a lot more film to be jammed into 70 minutes. Stars Wars is an hour, but when I do Lord Of The Rings, I condense 12 hours of film into a 70 minute performance. It has to jump around quite quickly. Some of my favourite parts to perform are quite small moments within the overall piece. There’s Boromir’s father, Denethor, and he’s the guy with the weird receding hairline who’s looking after the White City following Minas Tirith.
“It’s not necessarily something that everybody else thinks of, but I just love that scene where Pippin is singing to him, and he’s sort of stuffing his face in this violent way. I thought it was the most disgusting eating scene ever, and yet it still works so well, due to the fact that he sends a bunch of guys off to die. I do a little homage to that in my show.”
Charlie’s one-man show certainly impressed Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the LOTR films.
“He came to see the show when I did it in Vancouver in 2004,” recalls Ross. “It was very weird, he just appeared at the theatre. He stuck around at the end, and he loved the show. I had lunch with him a couple of weeks afterwards. It was very good to meet him and hear about how he had to deal with doing his own solo show, and touring it for years, in the hope that people check it out. His idea is that if you have a show like this under your belt, you never know when you’re going to have to come out and do it again, but you can still pursue other things.
“I think his one-person show was called Acting Shakespeare, and it was kind of a demystifying thing. He deconstructed the way people act Shakespeare, and looked at why the language seemed a bit inaccessible to some audiences. He just shed a revealing light onto Shakespeare and made it a little less out of touch.”
Does Charlie have plans to tackle any other films? I think it would be quite funny to seem him have a go at a movie like Pulp Fiction.
“I did a show a couple of years ago, in between doing Lord Of The Rings performances,” reflects Ross. “I took the idea of a blank videotape, which a lot of people had in the days of VCRs. My sister and I would record things off of television, and the tape was maybe six hours. But we’d record over each other’s stuff and it became almost a record of a battle between the sexes in the household; I’d some film I felt had to be saved for future generations, and my sister would record, you know, an episode of Coronation Street over the top.
“Coronation Street is fine, but the story goes along at a snail’s pace and nothing really changes! Anyway, I took the idea of this blank tape - which in my mind had music videos, commercials and movies from the 1980s - and I made it very much like the Star Wars show, where it jumped rapidly from thing to thing.
“It was very strange to do that show, because it was the type of piece where there was something for everyone. But if I was to do one more trilogy - and it would be nice to do one more - what are the options? There’s The Matrix, except the last one kind of sucked. It’s quite hard to find a trilogy that’s good from start to finish.
“I have asked about Indiana Jones, but you have to find something that’s iconic, like Lord Of The Rings. Otherwise, it’s like trying to do a show based on the ingredients list off of a packet of crisps.”