Sarah Kendall talks bending the truth and being mistaken for Nicole Kidman | London Evening Standard (original) (raw)

Sarah Kendall has done something particularly unusual with stand-up. She has reinvented it and herself, blending storytelling and monologue while retaining splashes of classic laugh-inducing comedy.

And it works phenomenally well. The Australian performer was nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2015 and this year the three-part Radio 4 series, Australian Trilogy, based on her youth in the mining town of Newcastle, New South Wales, won a Writers’ Guild Award for Best Radio Comedy.

She now comes to the Soho Theatre with One-Seventeen, which is also being adapted for radio. “The fourth part of the trilogy,” she says wryly as we open some doors to cool off in the theatre’s conference room on the hottest day of the year so far.

Kendall, 41, has had two distinct comedy careers. After moving to England at the age of 24 she became a stand-up and won her first Edinburgh Comedy Awards nomination in 2004. But since 2014 she has headed in a long-form direction, with a series of coming-of-age tales: Touchdown kicked off with a playing-field altercation. A Day in October was about a classmate’s near-death experience. Shaken was about an earthquake and how a small lie to explain why she was late for school prompted a police investigation.

The new show skilfully shuttles between family life in Putney today and her childhood down under and explores the nature of luck, taking in space travel, Halley’s Comet and a hamster with organ failure. It is captivating and enthralling. But how much is true?

“It’s all true. It just doesn’t always happen in the same time period. In my other shows a boy did die then come back to life. That’s how I learnt what ‘clinically dead’ meant when I was 11. I did tell a lie that got out of control and there was an earthquake, though maybe not in the same year...” The truth is a “slippery subject” when it comes to her art.

There is nothing slippery about the potency of her storytelling. “Something lovely happens to an audience when you tell them a story: they lean in. If you say, ‘Once upon a time there was a woman, and one day this woman found herself in a lot of trouble’, people will instinctively want to know why.”

It is a style that includes laughs but also, among other things, tragedy and surprise. Should it even be entitled to win comedy awards? “That’s interesting. The comedy makes me not take myself too seriously. I don’t like the monotone of drama because I don’t think that’s how life is. Life doesn’t work in genres. In any awful moment there can also be a funny moment.”

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The change of direction coincided with having two children, now five and eight. Kendall doesn’t miss rough-and-tumble club stand-up. “I got to a point where I didn’t want to do it. I wanted something more emotional. I either had to change or stop. I was always more comfortable telling stories rather than gags so I thought, ‘How do I keep doing that?’”

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Approaching 40 also prompted the stylistic gear-shift. “I was getting nostalgic. I suppose that happens when you realise your youth has gone. You can never go back there, whereas at 30 you think you think you can. So I wanted to occupy that space in my memory, the me before I had kids.” When she was a kid herself, in fact.

Perhaps this idea of easing from comedy into a more serious area is a family trait. Kendall’s husband is ex-comedian Henry Naylor, who played Rowan Atkinson’s secret agent sidekick in a run of Barclaycard ads. Now he is a playwright focusing on the Middle East; The Collector, performed at the Arcola in 2014, was set in an Iraqi prison.

But Kendall does not see herself moving that far from comedy. “I can’t do other worlds. It’s all variations on me and my memories. In a way it’s all a chronic lack of imagination.” Though she does see herself mainly as a writer. “There are some people you can’t get off the stage. I’d do my 20 minutes then I was off. I don’t think I’ve got the razzle-dazzle to be a performer.”

Which is ironic because in the past she has been mistaken for a very famous performer. When she lived in Australia people would comment on her similarity to Nicole Kidman. “For a while we were both tall redheads. During peak Sarah/Nicole era I was in the street in Sydney and a group was tourists was convinced I was her so I signed a couple of autographs.” As Kidman, of course.

Maybe that was an early hint of being economical with the truth. Though storytelling can be problematic when your parents are present. “They know what’s true and it makes me feel like a psychotic liar. But they absolutely get the idea of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story.” Her mother features in One-Seventeen, portrayed as an archetypal anxious parent. “It’s exactly what she’s like. We were in the park with my son and he put his mouth on a drinking tap and she said, ‘Don’t do that. People have probably been having sex on those swings and used that fountain as a bidet.’ She thinks there’s disease everywhere.”

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Looking back, Kendall was a trailblazer. There were not as many female comics when she started and they were rarely invited on to panel shows, so she did not receive the exposure comics such as Sara Pascoe and Katherine Ryan get today. Otherwise she might be a major stand-up star now.

“It has changed and it’s brilliant. We had the door slammed in our face repeatedly by the boys’ club.” Instead she has carved out her own path. She looks at the open door letting in the afternoon breeze. “I built my own door and walked through that. It’s taken 20 years for me to figure out what I do and I’m really grateful for that, so bizarrely I’m not bitter. Though thinking about that now, maybe I should be pissed off!”

Sarah Kendall: One-Seventeen is at Soho Theatre, W1, until May 19, sohotheatre.com