Emma McAlpine talks chocolate eggs and white rabbits with the Perrier award-winning comic. Well it is nearly Easter after all.
Laura Solon is eating Cadbury’s Mini Eggs when I call her. “Why are they only around at Easter? It’s not fair!” Quite. They are very moreish and considering sickly Creme Eggs are readily available for 365 days of the year, it's a ruddy disgrace. Cadbury’s eggs aside, I am speaking to Laura because she is halfway through a 46-date tour which stops for one night only in London on Sunday. Called Rabbit Faced Story Soup, the show is set in a publishing house and Solon plays ten different characters, from the hard-nosed American agent Marcie Blitzer to the pretentious French author Didier Auberge. “It’s about how a girl ends up writing the last chapter of a famous author’s book and it’s got a stuffed rabbit in it called Ian. It’s comedy meets taxidermy. I realised there was a niche for people who love both comedy and taxidermy – they weren’t being serviced by the live comedy circuit.”
So how does she manage to play ten different characters in a solo show? “I didn’t want any costume changes or scene changes because I don’t think there’s any costume you can put on in 20 seconds that looks good. I just do the whole story talking through the different characters. It took a lot of rehearsing but I think if you can be consistent with your voice people will buy into it.”
The show went down a storm at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, with glowing reviews from the critics. It’s been a welcome return to the circuit for Solon who, after winning the Perrier Award for her debut show in 2005, had a four year break from live comedy, performing in TV shows like Al Murray’s Multiple Personality Disorder and Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul; not to mention making her own comedy sketch series for Radio 4: “The first two years after I won the Perrier I was doing my radio series in August and then the year after I could have gone but I didn’t want to do another sketch show. I wanted to find a way of doing character comedy differently so the following year I had this idea of telling a story and took it up. And it means I got to buy more taxidermy.”
When she finally realised "winning Wimbledon wasn’t going to happen," Solon left university without a clue what career path to take: “I didn’t know what I wanted to do - I managed to get through university without doing any work experience or placements and I thought someone would just ring me up and say ‘What? You did English at university?! Come and have this amazing job!’ Everyone else had sorted out these placements and I just thought: ‘when did you guys do all this’? It was good because it meant I didn’t have a proper job to leave. If you start with nothing then you cope with nothing.”
Having written and performed in the Oxford Revue (she has an amazing knack for accents and voices), Solon gave stand-up a try but quickly realised character comedy was her forte. “I think stand-up is really hard because with characters you can always change your show. There are so many amazing stand-ups out there that I wouldn’t want to be just another one who makes middle-of-the-road comments about how the tube’s always busy. With characters I can invent my own crazy world and don’t have to take a sideways look at the news.”
In 2005, she decided to take a double-act show called Kopfraper's Syndrome to the Edinburgh Fringe. Her partner would play a mentally ill person and she would be his carer. He pulled out before it started due to work commitments but Solon managed to adjust the show, playing all eight characters herself. As a relatively unknown comic, when she got the Perrier nomination initially she assumed it was for ‘Best Newcomer’ rather than ‘Best Show’ and was overwhelmed when she finally won the award. She is the second woman ever to win the prestigious title, after Jenny Eclair in 1995.
Currently, Solon is at home writing before the tour "goes crazy" and is trying to get inspired for the 2010 Fringe: “You have to decide in March if you’re going and then you have to write a whole new show quite quickly which is daunting. Even though I haven’t been a student for eight years, it feels like I’m still one with this constant essay crisis going on! And I sleep late – I’m really good at sleeping. If there was a job where I’d get paid for sleeping I think I’d make a lot of money.”
Rabbit Faced Story Soup will be at Leicester Square Theatre on Sunday 7th March.
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