Since the early years of his visibility as a British actor, Richard E Grant seems to have magnetised an abiding scepticism from the press. It has been as though showbusiness hacks were somehow thrown by the combination of low-key openness and casual irony that they took to be some kind of pretentiousness. He was particularly bothersome to them.
“What’s the E for?” they’d go. And he’d tell them there was already a Richard Grant on the scene when he was applying for his Equity card, and his agent didn’t think using his real surname, Esterhuysen, was going to be a thrill a minute on film credits, so the E was a convenient compromise.
By the time the first Richard Grant retired, the die, as it were, had been cast. Only they didn’t believe him. He explained he was from Swaziland, where his father was a minister of education, and they took that as so much more old flannel, as though Hugh Grant (no relation) had claimed to be Chinese.
Somewhere back in Grant’s paternal ancestry, there were men who were Dutch or Hungarian, and certainly Afrikaner. Yet, he feels his father was an Englishman, working for the British government, and he is a Swazi who happens also to be English.
He lives in Surrey, south of London, but still classifies himself as an immigrant. He used to wear two watches, one telling Greenwich Mean Time, the other the time of day in Swaziland. Swaziland was his home. Where he was born. Where he grew up and where his heart is. When called upon to sing at auditions, he would stand solemnly and belt out the Swazi national anthem. He didn’t mean to be funny.
He patently enjoys talking about his homeland. The singular beauty of its landscape, what he refers to as the serenity of the indigenous population, the nefarious eccentricities of the European ruling class. “Swaziland is a small part of south-east Africa, the last country in the continent to gain its independence,” he says, sounding rather as one of his father’s kindly schoolmasters must have sounded as he stood by a British government-issue blackboard in front of a crowd of happy Swazi schoolkids.
“The curious thing about Swaziland is that it is a one-tribe, single-language country, so, unlike almost everywhere else in Africa, they never had any intertribal warfare. It was a protectorate, which meant the colonials who lived there had been invited and regarded themselves as necessary and welcome by common consent. It was a very hermetically sealed society,” he went on, then dropped the schoolmasterly dirge. “It was a sort of equatorial suburb. A most peculiar little enclave.”
Nowadays, Swaziland could hardly be described in such rose-tinted terms if, indeed, it ever could. Its peculiarities include a notoriously profligate monarch who bats off any attempt at democracy, one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates and subsistence on less than a dollar a day for the majority of the population.
The enclave of his memory has become a lifelong preoccupation for Grant. The black/white social divide, the suburban White Mischief promiscuity of the colonial ladies and gentlemen, the contradictions between private and public lives, the pomposities and snobberies and hierarchies are all ludicrous in hindsight. But, as children, we don’t have that perspective. “When you’re in the madhouse,” he says, succinct as ever, “you don’t know everyone’s mad because it’s your norm. You don’t know anything else.”
He subscribes to the notion, “Give me a boy till he’s seven and I will give you the man”, and has had a good many years to brood from an adult perspective. And his affection for Swaziland is undiminished. Class barriers, hypocrisy, snobbery, highnesses and lownesses; these are the sources of our national comedy, he says. It was all so 1950s, so uniquely and typically English.
These are the things that shaped him, boy and man, like it or not. When, in the late 1990s, a producer asked him to write a screenplay for his own film, he felt he was already halfway there. Wah-Wah was in his head. All he had to do was write it down, which he did, in two and a half months flat. Then the fun started.
His producer withdrew to take up social work in the West Indies and Grant was left holding the script. From 1999 to 2004, he flogged what he refused to believe was a dead horse. Every producer, every finance company he went to, said no. “It’s a chicken and egg situation,” he said. “You’ve got to get name actors in order to get the finance, and in order to get the name actors you’ve got to bullshit that you’ve got the finance, while all the time you feel the whole thing could just unravel, the wheels come off the pram, everything conspires to make you sink into a pit of self-pity and despair.”
The idea of help from friendly thesps was fairly abhorrent to him. “When an actor asks you to read his script, your heart sinks. The number of scripts I’ve been given by actors that are so unbelievably terrible! It’s well known that actors are lousy writers.”
Still, he gritted his teeth and showed his dream script to Gabriel Byrne. He liked it. So Grant had found his father. And so it went on, one step forward, two steps back. Permission to film in his country, granted by the king of Swaziland, more rewrites and castings and suddenly it’s June 7 2004 and he has £4-million, a star cast (Gabriel Byrne, Julie Walters, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Celia Imrie) and seven weeks to make his movie.
“It was all a bit kick-bollocks-scramble-and-squeak,” he says eloquently. “A bit like organising a fantastically huge wedding and then just popping the little bride and groom figurine on top of the cake.”
He’d worried his guts out over his directorial debut, thinking he didn’t have the technical know-how, but, when the crunch came, he hit the ground running. “I loved every nanosecond of it,” he says. “I felt like the boy with the biggest train set, more Meccano gear than anyone else. I loved being asked 2Â 000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.”
It was, he agrees, a kind of exorcism for him, but also “a fantastic treat” to go back into his past with actors to recreate the reality of his boyhood. It was as though the five years of boyhood encapsulated on film came — with the help of his friends and two lads, one 10, one 15, whom he calls his doppelgängers — to represent the whole cycle of his life. From the small boy who made a shoebox theatre with figures stuck on lollipop sticks to the glove puppets, to marionettes on strings, to school plays, to amateur dramatics and drama school and film acting and then back again to Swaziland, watching his takes on a playback monitor a similar size to his original shoebox.
If Wah-Wah was self-indulgent in its making, the finished product is a prime example of a genre rarely, if ever, attempted by British or American filmmakers: a child’s experience, impeccably observed through the narrow lens of the child’s perspective. In the mid-20th century, there were French, Italian, Spanish, even Swedish examples of this, but Anglo-American influences gradually either sentimentalised or forgot the starkly one-dimensional reality of childhood, the solipsism of the child observing adult behaviour without the defence of detachment.
Wah-Wah opens with a small boy pretending to sleep in the back of a car while a man and woman copulate on the front seat, broadens to the edgy domesticity of the boy’s home life, hones in on his facial tic, a mouth-gaping silent scream, then lingers on his private hobby as he holds two lollipop stick puppets, one in each hand, and has them shout Shuddup-Shuddup-Shuddup at each other. And so, with much Proustian detail, we go on.
The boy and Swaziland get their independence in the end, or whatever it is we take for independence, and you can make what you will of the moral of the piece. Grant says it’s a love story, or it tells you how you pay for the choices you make in life. I think it’s more a case of you don’t always get what you want, but, like The Rolling Stones tell us, if you try sometimes, you get what you need. He quite likes that idea. He says he still feels the urge to do the silent scream, big as he is.
He called it Wah-Wah because that was how his dad’s second wife described the conversational tone of colonialists at their leisure. He tells of the country club’s choice of Camelot for the am-dram treat for Princess Margaret’s official visit to mark Independence Day and how, driven by a lack of white talent, they included a black man in their production, scrupulously whiting-up his face with plimsoll cleaner so Margaret wouldn’t notice. Even so, she made her excuses and left in the interval. Said she wasn’t feeling well, apparently.
It gradually emerges, to my astonishment, that give or take the odd tinkering with the timescale, Wah-Wah is not just true, but literally true, frame by frame. Grant is surprised that I am surprised. — Â