London’s Shrek talks about fatsuits and farting lessons

Shrek the Musical opens at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane next Fri­day. Actor Nigel Lind­say who plays the green man talked to The Times about his first fat­suit fitting:

After lunch it’s my first fat­suit fit­ting. First they stick on the fat­suit worn on Broad­way for a year by the actor Brian d’Arcy James. It’s lovely to be so close to Shrek at last, less to be so close to Brian. Even with the air­holes, punched in by an indus­trial rivet-maker, there’s twelve months of reek­ing Shrek sweat in here. I hold my breath as the huge, pad­ded, slightly moist two-piece suit goes on, then the all-in-one tartan strides, the hes­sian top and brown belt, six-inch-heeled boots, and the green cowl.

My first impres­sion is one of intense excite­ment. Then the heat hits me. I’ve only been stand­ing here for five minutes but feel as if I’d done a two-hour alfresco step class at noon in Ouagadougou. I want to lie down. How the hell are you sup­posed to speak, sing, dance when you are dressed like the Mich­elin Man’s fat brother?

And on fart­ing with Amanda Holden,

This morn­ing the rehearsal board tells me I have “Remedial Fart­ing with Ms Amanda Holden”. Shrek and Fiona have a fart­ing duet (Ibsen eat your heart out), which, when last attemp­ted, dis­solved into a chaos of play­ground his­tri­on­ics (hence the “remedial”). I like Amanda. She has had a hard time of it recently, none of which she has brought to the rehearsal room. She can sing and act and doesn’t take her­self too ser­i­ously. We had a stage dir­ec­tion, now cut, that read: “Shrek makes the noise of the buzzer from Britain’s Got Tal­ent.” I con­fessed in front of the com­pany, rather sheep­ishly because I didn’t want to embar­rass her, that I had never watched the pro­gramme. She feigned hor­ror. Next day she slipped a toy buzzer she had brought from the show into my hand.

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