Creating a monster

In London’s Camden Market, swarms of crusty old punks and goth kids are weaving past parlours offering custom tattoos, genital piercing and decorative scarification. If you want to be different, this is where you come to get the right look, build a suitably obscure record collection and drink alongside people every bit as unique as yourself. In the stalls, independent traders pander to all manner of subcultures and alternative lifestyles – but in the little black box of the Etcetera Theatre, perched above it all, something genuinely odd is coming to life.

“Like a slug!”

“Like a heron!”

“A bit less Germanic.”

“Yes, and then you grab her arse.”

Colin Hoult paces the stage, gnawing at an apple as he cycles through a medley of misfits, each of his characters rendered with its own accent, bearing and particular brand of wretchedness. It’s three nights before the fourth preview of Enemy of the World, and experimentation is still in full effect.

Crying out these instructions like callers at the world’s weirdest line dance are director-cum-cast-member Steve Evans (previously of sketch group The Dutch Elm Conservatoire) and producer Kat Nugent (Hoult’s wife). Zoe Gardner later steps through the door and right into character, bouncing off Hoult with an impossibly straight face and a similar knack for the ridiculous. Together they are piecing together what will become the follow-up to Carnival of Monsters, an hour of twisted character comedy and anarchic sketches that in 2009 took a portakabin by the Pleasance Courtyard and turned it into a freak show.

Watching at this early stage, the effect is something like flicking between channels: out of context, few of these rough ideas make sense. The cast look jarringly ordinary in t-shirts and trainers, Evans’s guitar is currently of the air variety – and yet these scraps of colourful characters and pitch-black humour are unmistakably products of the same mind that spawned last year’s offering.

Hoult's latest show looks even more ambitious than Carnival – which was far from safe. “I’ve gone beyond my means a bit," he admits, "and decided to do a trilogy.”

Whereas the first in the series centred on monsters, this latest instalment (his Empire Strikes Back, he calls it) will push villains to the forefront, before things come to a close with the theme of heroes. It’s a big idea, a product of an excitable imagination that's not easily put out by low budgets, small casts and smaller theatres.

The challenge of paring down these grand designs to a more practicable form has become something of a recurring theme in Hoult’s work. Given the macabre tone of Enemy of the World, it comes as a surprise to hear Walt Disney named as an influence, but it was the animator’s creative strategy of filtering ideas through a workforce divided into three groups—Dreamers, Realists and Critics—that inspired Hoult’s method.

To him, the first of these roles comes naturally, and so we have a comedy show with the look of 1920s German cabaret, structured around life, death and beyond, and soundtracked by "the band from the Titanic, as ghosts." Among the ideas Hoult floated while writing was a recreation of an entire scene from Transformers: The Movie. Another began with the premise "that the BNP had taken over Britain, and this was the sketch show that could happen in that world." Today, though, his more realistic and critical (yet sufficiently indulgent) team is more concerned with the practicalities of using a Mr Potato Head prop for three weeks without the spud rotting.

Having been reined in, last year’s final product took on the feel of a macaroni-and-glitter-glue homage to the melodramatic and macabre tradition of the horror genre. It was shot through with observational wit, songs and snippets of poetry. Today’s rehearsal suggests that this recipe will remain constant, showing traces of Hoult’s geeky admiration for the excess of HP Lovecraft novels and the kitsch of Doctor Who (an episode of which lends its name to this year’s show).

This is a man whose honeymoon on the Costa del Sol involved a special detour to a "witchcraft and torture museum" which housed shrunken heads, an iron maiden and a ludicrous hybrid animal exhibit that one Flickr user dubbed "Toad with a lawyer’s face." He talks about these grotesque and exotic inspirations with a starry-eyed enthusiasm that brings to mind Ed Wood, the director of sensational ‘50s B-movies and subject of Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic. Appropriately, today's rehearsal is interrupted when a sound effect lifted from a thousand flying saucer scenes warbles from his phone.

Despite an aesthetic that draws on exploitation cinema and Victorian gothic, his characters will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has encountered the eccentricities of everyday life. The "monsters" Hoult conjures up were spawned not in dungeons and laboratories but in the supermarkets and job centres of his native Nottingham.

Take Len Parker, the superficially macho martial arts enthusiast whom he unleashed on the studio audience of BBC3’s Russell Howard’s Good News late last year. This deeply insecure hard man evolved from a resident at the nursing home where Hoult used to work: “The first day I got there, he was sat there in a string vest—a really big bloke—and he was like, "So you’re working here now, are you? Do you do karate? He wasn’t nice like Len, he was actually sort of horrible. And he did this whole thing about how he used to do karate and he was in this competition against a 12-year-old lad – he broke his arm!”

Hoult’s brash thespian, Anna Mann, was also born in reality. Hoult is too tactful to identify the true inspiration for this deranged old ham, but he confirms that she sprouted from his background in theatre. Lapsing into the character’s abrasive RP, he recounts what it was like to work with what he admiringly terms "real actors": “They just talk – but they’re all quite thick, which I find fascinating. I was reading a book at the time and this person went, ‘What are you reading?’ I was reading Crime and Punishment, so I told her and she went, ‘Oh, fuck off! Oh, that’s wonderful! Oh, you clever man! Clever boy! You’re very brainy, aren’t you? Oh, shut up. You’re a genius!’”

Though he speaks of these muses with a sort of baffled fondness, the resulting treatments can, at times, be unflinchingly cruel: "It’s been a shit life," reflects one of his more piteous creations, having endured decades of bullying. The consensus in the room is that this particular line might be just a shade too gloomy.

"Yeah, but there are a lot of people who’ve never had a good moment," Hoult protests, grinning. It’s typical of a performer who, when not simply indulging in the outlandish, seems to revel in making his audiences squirm with unbearably pathetic personas, ensuring that the hour is never quite an easy ride for those watching.

Through a series of uninhibited audience interactions, last year’s show saw the tables turned to expose an off-guard public as the true monsters of its title. As might be expected from a theatre school graduate, Hoult puts this down to the influence of avant-garde dramatist and serial fourth-wall botherer Bertolt Brecht, who has an unlikely successor in Hoult and his playful harassment of the front rows. 

“Yes, you’re creating this world,” he argues, “but at the same time these people are in the room with you, and it can be quite pretentious to pretend they’re not.”

The approach is yet to go wrong, though he recalls a torrent of Twitter abuse he received after a BBC3 viewer failed spectacularly to realise that the supposed audience member Hoult had picked on was in fact credited cast member, Dan Snelgrove. Inevitably, Hoult is coy when asked if Snelgrove (whom he poached from a local punk band purely for his reckless stage antics) will return for Enemy of the World. But regardless of who or what is involved this time, Hoult’s Fringe audiences can expect to find themselves dragged into the midst of his bizarre little world.

“It’s not a power thing,” he insists. “I don’t want to humiliate people. But if it works it’ll actually feel quite joyous.”