Brian Sergent
One urban reptile said to the other
by Jane Bowron
New Zealand’s greatest comic actor, Brian Sergent, is about to take on the character of the legendary Brian Bell – a hellraiser, possibly a genius, kindly fellow and terrible old bastard who was “in a class of his own”.
Very suddenly, Brian Sergent materialises in the departure lounge at Christchurch Airport, looking like something Scotty has just beamed up. He’s been in Dunedin revivifying his flagging spirits with the pre-Raphaelite exhibition, but it already seems to have worn off. He’s done with airports, he says, as he morosely observes the spectacle of families trying to get back to where they came from three days after Christmas.
“Everybody looks evil,” he mutters and shuffles silently on board flight NZ440 to Wellington. He sits in the wrong seat, but shifts after a girl waves her ticket number at him and whispers loudly to her boyfriend: “Isn’t that that actor guy?”
It is. Sergent is a day off 45, and is very low. He has only recently returned from LA where he spent three nightmarish days hanging round an airport haggling with the promoters of a Lord of the Rings conference who pulled the financial plug – but hadn’t bothered to tell a group of New Zealand actors boarding the plane to LA on the way to the conference in Oregon.
He’s miserable and bellicose, which is good if you’re a method actor because that’s just how he needs to be when he plays Rodney Pump in The Love of Human Kind, a play that opens this week at Wellington’s Circa Theatre.
Sergent wrote it. Longtime friend and colleague Danny Mulheron, who is directing the play, bequeathed Sergent his old computer and in a matter of weeks the actor had bashed off his first play, which is based on the friendship of two Wellington pensioners, Brian Bell and Mark Smith.
During the interview, Sergent and I work out when we first met Bell. Sergent puts his introduction at a couple of years before I managed to secure an interview with Bell, spread over 12 hours and four cafés, for a story about eccentrics. We both agree that it was when the old boy must have been in his sixties, an age Bell would vehemently deny, as he always insisted that he was in his early fifties.
Sergent and I met over 20 years ago when we were both cast in a play produced by Wellington Repertory Theatre. Pasted outside the theatre, there were appalling publicity pictures taken of me in shortie pyjamas , which I’d completely forgotten about till one day when I was round at Mark Smith’s, and Bell asked me if I wanted to see pictures of Olga, the Russian bride he’d once been married to. As Bell was pathologically private about his past relationships, marriages and children, I smelt a rat, but it took me a while to recognise that the girl in the photograph he held out for me to look at was myself. It was a classic Bell gag, with the long, rambling anecdote to set it up and then, kapow, the strange resurfacing of a theatrical relic that left you reeling with its elaborate and slightly creepy calculation.
But that was Bell. If you were going to be his friend, you had to take the good with the bad.
When Sergent first wrote The Love of Human Kind, he hadn’t planned on performing in it. But when the role became increasingly difficult to cast, Frankenstein decided that he’d have to play the special monster he’d created that is now called Rodney Pump.
“He’s a man who’s very bright, wonderful with words, but socially impaired or retarded and finds it difficult to say please and thank you properly,” he says. “His story is difficult to tell because it’s quite emotional and mad, as is his outlook on life, which is pretty cynical and often impaired by alcohol.
“He has a combative outlook. He expects trouble and he finds it from the most innocuous things to genuine hassles. His low irritation level makes him difficult to get close to or be around for any length of time.
“In controlled doses, this self-confessed ergophobe [someone with a powerful aversion to work] is hugely entertaining and he knows all these things about himself, but he’s fighting that as well – fighting his own personality.”
Pump has known Mark Smith (who is based on the real Smith, now deceased) since the 1960s, when Smith was a low-ranking public servant. One of Smith’s lines in the play is: “I was 42 years old on the wages of an office boy.” Running parallel with this humdrum professional existence was an extraordinarily prolific, dramatic and hilarious erotic career.
Smith to Pump from the play: “Every woman I’ve ever met has been two-faced, grasping, treacherous and will stop at nothing because they’ve got this bit of paper with a secret message screwed up and stuck inside their ear and on that piece of paper is a message that says, ‘I hate men.’ That’s why I’ve left it in my will for a man to come along with an aerosol can and write on my coffin lid: ‘I hate women.’”
Sergent vividly remembers an excruciating walk down Lambton Quay with Bell tagging behind a very elegantly dressed woman and blowing raspberry noises. The woman would turn round and Bell would say wickedly, “Don’t they start when you do that?”
“These poor women had done nothing to him, but the mere fact that they were women meant they’d done something to someone. He liked to prick the bubble of their gentility by doing things like that.”
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