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From class A drugs to a little light opera

Brian Pendreigh meets the former Trainspotters reunited on Mike Leigh's new Gilbert and Sullivan drama

When Kevin McKidd and Shirley Henderson last appeared in a film together, she got showered with shit and he died of AIDS. Mind you, they did secure a place for themselves in film history when Trainspotting, based on the Irvine Welsh novel, was hailed the best British film of the decade and became a huge international hit.

McKidd played Tommy, the clean-living one who tries heroin only after being dumped by his girlfriend. Henderson was Gail, who fails to rouse her boyfriend Spud from his drunken stupor with an offer of "casual sex". The relationship comes to a spectacularly messy end the following morning after Spud has a "slight accident" and tries to smuggle the sheets out while Gail and her parents have breakfast. It is one of the most hilariously gross scenes ever filmed.

Since then, McKidd has played another junkie with AIDS in the television mini-series Looking After Jo Jo and a loser abused by his wife in the film version of Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. Henderson, meanwhile, is the single mum in pursuit of sex in Michael Winterbottom's gritty new urban drama Wonderland.

"I wondered if I was getting typecast," admits McKidd. She needn't have worried. Such fears are knocked firmly on the head in Topsy-Turvy, which premieres at the London Film Festival next week. It takes a particularly energetic leap of the imagination to go from rvine Welsh to Gilbert and Sullivan, from Francis Begbie to Nanki-Poo. In the least likely reunion of the year, the former Trainspotters play a couple of light-opera singers from the 19th century.

The film, which focuses on the original production of The Mikado, is also a major change of direction for writer-director Mike Leigh, best known for biting contemporary comedy-drama, such as Life is Sweet, Naked and Secrets and Lies. Leigh is sticking to his usual style of filming, though. "It's the Mike Leigh method applied to the year 1885," says McKidd.

Henderson first met Leigh for an audition, which turned out to be more of "a chat", in early summer 1997. "He just sits and blethers with you," she says. It was the first of a series of meetings, during which he set her a number of challenges. "He will give you a scenario and say, 'I want you to think of somebody between this age and this age... Now just sit and be her, do something she would do, and don't speak, don't be clever and don't mime'... I don't know what he's seeing."

Eventually Henderson also had to prove she could sing. Not that hard, since she started her showbiz career in her early teens singing Barbara Streisand numbers and cabaret standards in clubs in Fife. If she could convince the local miners she could sing, she reasoned, she ought to be able to persuade Leigh.

By the end of the year she was told she would be playing Leonora Braham, the Londoner who sang the role of Yum-Yum. There followed months of intensive research, reading personal letters, listening to contemporary music, and visiting the records office and the formerly genteel part of Kings Cross where Braham lived. "I was being paid to do all this research," she says. "It's very frustrating eventually, because you get to the point where you want to do something: you've got all this information in your head... It took a year before I actually started filming."

Research, it seems, is part of the job when you work with Mike Leigh. McKidd was immersed in research that took him back to his native Scotland, just round the coast from his childhood home in Elgin. He traced tenor Durward Lely's roots to the fishing port of Arbroath. "This guy up in Arbroath heard him singing in the church one day... and funded him to go to Milan (to train as an opera singer). His actual name was James Durward Lyle. When he went to Milan, he changed the Lyle to Lely because it sounded more Italian."

The singing, of course, constitutes a significant proportion of the film. "I had to learn opera singing," says McKidd. "And we spent six months singing every day. Henderson and McKidd joined Leigh regulars Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent in the trademark workshop sessions. As Henderson points out, they would "build a scene over hours and hours, days sometimes, before getting to the point of filming".

"There's no script," says McKidd. "You improvise." Even then, the actors were kept largely in the dark about what was happening. "You shoot your bits and you're not privy to any other information."

The film has left a lasting impression on McKidd too. "I was never into G and S," he says. "But by the end, I had listened to so much that I turned into a bit of a G and S buff." It seems that no sooner do you kick one habit than you find yourself acquiring another one.

Guardian 4 November 1999

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