I’ve grown out of the gay scene explains the performance artist in his treacly northern accent It’s become very bland

“I’ve grown out of the gay scene,” explains the performance artist in his treacly northern accent “It’s become very bland, more of a lifestyle really It’s so tame. I don’t want to look like a sheep and join the new army, I’d rather do my own thing.” This week he does just that in The Divine David Untitled… Naturally, a piece of devised theatre running in the Albany’s Theatre Not Cabaret season. The one-man, character-driven show is part autobiographical, part fantasy, and entirely fascinated with death. “It’s a very wonderful thing we all have in common,” deadpans David, “we’re all going to die”.

Brought up in Blackpool, David used to trot off to the end of the pier to see the likes of Mary Hopkins, Ken Dodd and The Bachelors (“quite appropriate, really”) before making his debut at local working-men’s clubs. Tonight, he simply asks “are you alive enough to be offended?”Albany Theatre, Douglas Way, Deptford, London (0181-692 4446) from Wed 8pm pounds 6. An Irish doctor who has seen better days sits dressed in a pith helmet, dinner jacket and a towel. Pathetically singing, slurring his words and swigging from a bottle, he hails a returning war hero by throwing his arms up in the air. The scabbard flies off the regimental sword he is holding and clatters across the room This is a bravura boozer. Doctor Monygham, a good-hearted medic tormented by unrequited love and by a body ravaged with drink and physical torture in the BBC’s epic four- part adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, is a part right up Albert Finney’s street.

In recent years, the actor has cornered the market in tortured souls of a certain age. Think of his Daniel Feeld, the terminally- ill, self-loathing writer in Karaoke, or Sergeant Hegarty from The Playboys, a pent-up ball of jealous rage.
It is a tribute to Finney’s skill as an actor that, face to face, the only look of agony that passes across his lived-in features is when his Zeppelin-sized Havana cigar goes out and needs re-lighting He is a barrel of bonhomie off screen. A bear-like man in a large tweed jacket and loose black trousers, he zaps you with an anecdote- per-minute rate that would leave even Ned Sherrin gasping for breath.With his ruddy cheeks and comfortable waistline, he cultivates the image of a roisterous bon viveur. John Hale, the adaptor of Nostromo, who has known Finney since the 1961 Edinburgh Festival, confirms that “he likes the flesh pots”. Finney says the heat during the filming of Nostromo in Colombia made him lose weight, “but one does one’s best to counteract that”. Asked if he encountered any drugs in Cartagna de Indias, he replies with a characteristic, rich laugh: “I’m still doing research into Havana cigars and Burgundy wine. When I’ve done that, I’ll have a look at other subjects.”Speaking in a deep, Burgundy voice, he is appealingly modest about his pain-wracked performance as Monygham “I don’t feel I’m a masochist,” he claims “I don’t want to put myself through the wringer.

I just felt he was an interesting fellow and his problems were worth having a crack at.”Michael Wearing, the executive producer of Nostromo, is more effusive. He reckons that Finney plays tormented so well “because he’s not tormented in real life He’s a tremendous lover of life. He’s not self-important, and he doesn’t hide behind a whole intellectual cage of nonsense, which some actors do. What he’s got is an endless curiosity about people and places.”That scene [described above] is a masterclass in how to act drunk,” Wearing continues, “but it’s just one scene. Albert has caught that mad English quality of those people who went all over the world and landed in the most inappropriate places, but still contributed something Albert manages to understand that. He gives me the impression that he’s in control professionally of what he needs to do.