Funnyman Nigel Planer gets serious about his Jewish heritage

I was 15 when Nigel Planer first made me laugh. As one half of the stand-up comedy act The Outer Limits, Planer and Peter Richardson (who founded The Comic Strip) introduced me to alternative comedy and I was hooked.

Ridiculous and irreverent, it was the equivalent of South Park for this 70s teenager, who could never have imagined that 37 years later, Planer would appear in a film I co-wrote with Richardson. The Comic Strip Presents: Red Top was a satire about the phone hacking scandal in which Nigel played a downtrodden Rupert Murdoch confined to a wheelchair and still managed to be funny.

Beloved as hapless hippy Neil of The Young Ones, Planer has appeared in a smorgasbord of TV and theatre productions over the years, but it was only when I asked him to talk to me about Emanate Productions’ The Arc: A Trilogy of New Jewish Plays at the Soho Theatre that his Jewish heritage was mentioned. That he shared this revelation first with Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times last week, I’ll take on the chin, but it in no way diminishes the impact of Planer being the son of a German Jewish refugee.

Documents and photos shoved in a drawer provided the evidence that his late father George had escaped Berlin as Hitler took power, but Planer and his two brothers had never asked questions.

As he told Freeman: “When my dad left Berlin, people were being encouraged by the state to grass up their own parents if they were Jewish. I was born in 1953, not long after the end of the war. So it was kind of a reasonable position for him to take, don’t you think?”

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Planer wonders if his interest in acting and fiction writing stems from him not being allowed to know the truth as a child. Regardless, his latest novel, Jeremiah Bourne In Time, which he decribes as “a steam punk, historical futuristic, time travel adventure comedy”, carries the baggage of his father’s experience.

That his story about a boy who discovers mementoes of his missing mother in a biscuit tin and then falls through time trying to find her is his own examination of rootlessness is powerful.

But Planer has no desire to identify as Jewish, as his mother wasn’t and he doesn’t go in for identity politics, particularly of the religious kind. So I’ll forgive him for not saying anything, even though there was the announcement of him playing not one, but two Jewish grandfathers in the next few weeks. There’s Catherine Dyson’s The Egg Man on Radio 4 and then the trilogy of plays which explore life’s pivotal moments through a distinctly Jewish lens.

“I’m in Birth, which is written by Amy Rosenthal (daughter of the late screenwriter Jack Rosenthal) and Marriage by Alexis Zegerman,” Planer tells me. “Birth is the delivery seen retrospectively by a retired gynaecologist and Marriage is about first dates and where they lead to. I play an old man who may also be God. I’m looking forward to them starting.”

Planer has no desire to identify as Jewish, as his mother wasn’t and he doesn’t go in for identity politics, particularly of the religious kind.

Jewish heritage aside, any help he has needed preparing for the roles was available from his Jewish wife Roberta, whom I’ve always known about, as Peter Richardson was the best man when they married ten years ago. “Roberta has helped me understand all things Jewish, because I was brought up secular and atheistic, even though my father and grandparents escaped from Berlin in 1933,” he says to underline the point. “My mother was not Jewish, so I am a category error.”

But could not being Jewish and playing a Jew be a bone of contention in a business currently obsessed with ‘like-for-like’ casting? “Well, from my point of view, if one had to be exactly like for like I would get no work at all,” sniffs Planer.

“I would not qualify as any particular identity. So I am not very much for identity casting. As I say, I am a category error, a non categorisable individual, half one thing, half another. Like Woody Allen’s The Great Roe – a creature which had the head of a lion – and the body of a lion. But not the same lion.”

Planner isn’t convinced that casting restrictions will impede actors or put an end to drama training. “But in general terms I don’t think it’s altogether helpful as we have other problems to contend with, such as AI.”

Of the three playwrights who have conceived The Arc, Planer was only familiar with Ryan Craig.

“I saw his first play at the Menier Chocolate factory years ago, but never met him. I worked with Alexis when we were joint tutors on an Arvon writers’ residential course, which I highly recommend for those unsure of the direction of their writing.

“And I’ve never worked with Amy, but I know her from something called The Dramatists Club, which has been going since about 1910. It meets quarterly and is an opportunity for playwrights to moan to each other over a nice dinner and be sure to have a sympathetic hearing.”

Planer is hopeful audiences will give a sympathetic hearing to his portrayals of Jewish characters. “Funnily enough I’ve always wanted to do this, “he admits, “And I am relishing incarnating my grandparents.”

Planer has also published a volume of collected poetry called Making Other Plans, as in ‘life is what happens when you’re making other plans’ (John Lennon song). “These are poems stretching backwards in a sort of reverse memoir to 1970. In the 90s I published poems in The Guardian and several anthologies as well as touring the country as a performance poet with the likes of Henry Normal, John Cooper Clark, Lemn Sissay and Owen O’Neil.” Planer is touring again with Normal this autumn.

Jeremiah Bourne In Time is published by Unbound, £14.99

The Arc: A Trilogy of New Jewish Plays is at Soho Theatre 15 – 26 August sohotheatre.com