Interview Mark Little

We speak to the former 'Neighbours' star now performing in comedy play Defending The Caveman

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Interview: Mark Little

“A lot of people know my name as Joe Mangel more than Mark Little - it’s quite insane, but that’s just the way it goes. He’s stuck like shit to corduroy, as they say,” Little laughs, as we reminisce about his time on ‘Neighbours’. “Joe Mangel’s done this thing to me - people still think I’m a bloody gardener! I’m like, ‘No, no, I was just pretending, I’m actually an actor. I’m not a gardener in Ramsay Street. It was just a role!’ So I have to remind people.”

Little, who has lived in Brighton for the past 19 years, has performed in Leeds on various occasions. “I love Leeds - if Leeds had a beach, I think I’d live there!”. He’s a classically trained actor with many strings to his bow, including movies, TV presenting, open-air Shakespeare and various other theatre roles. “As an actor in these times, and with kids as well, it was necessary that I had my fingers in a lot of pies to just keep paying the rent.” He also recently made a film in Mozambique for the charity WaterAid: “We made a documentary about sanitation and how many people in the world don’t have toilets. And how simple it is to have a toilet, but the education and the money is not there, and that’s why a lot of people die across the developing world. Diseases like AIDS and malaria are not really what kills a lot of them, it’s the fact that they haven’t got the proper sanitation. So it’s all a bit sad, and it’s so simple. I’d never been to Africa before and I’ve fallen in love with the place. It’s really, really cool. There are lots of smart people in Africa. It’s a tragedy that we let it happen, and that it does happen. But it does and, well, what can we do, just do our own little bit every now and then.”

He is in Leeds this fortnight to perform the Olivier Award-winning one-man play Defending the Caveman. What’s the play all about? “The bloke who wrote Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus got the idea for that book from this play,” he says. “With ...Caveman, we’re on the same planet, but once upon a time we were caveman, cavewoman. Different cultures, different customs, different histories, different languages, and we look at man as the hunter and women as gatherers. The hunter’s job was to concentrate on their prey, to the exclusion of everything else in the whole world. That’s why as blokes, we’re not too good at doing too many things at once - a bloke has to turn down the car radio when he gets lost, some blokes have been known to follow their satnav over a cliff, you know, they just get a bit too zoned in. There’s a million-and-one examples of how we’re different, and how important once upon a time that used to be - that’s why we survived as a species. And maybe as modern man and modern woman we have lost sight of that, and through feminism and post-feminism, and ladettes and metrosexuals, modern man doesn’t know whether he’s Arthur or Martha.

“It’s looking at a bit of a male crisis,” he continues. “The play opens with the line ‘all men are arseholes’. And the women are thinking, ‘Oh brilliant, this is gonna be a good show’. And all the blokes are sitting there thinking, ‘Yeah, I know, I know’. None of the blokes even boo or hiss - they just go, ‘Yeah, I know, I’ve heard that before’. But it’s saying, well, we can’t all be arseholes really; maybe we’re different and maybe it’s the fact that we’re not like women, that’s what pisses women off so much, that we’re not like them. It’s a very, very clever piece of writing. I’ve been with this play for 10 years and it seems more relevant to British society now than it did back then, 10 years ago. Now, with gender issues and what with metrosexuality and a bit of a male crisis and a lot of ASBO young men running around, a lot of 40 year-old boys running around who haven’t made that step up from boy to man, whatever that means. So the play’s very clever like that. There’s a lot of love in it, it’s got half a brain and it’s really, really funny. It’s a great recession piece of entertainment. People burst with laughter.”
22-23 March, Grand Theatre, 46 New Briggate, LS1 6NZ, 0113 222 6222, 7.30pm, £17-£22.50

Posted on Tuesday 2nd March 2010
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