His fair share

Brit-born comedian Nigel Williams takes 30+ years of living in Flanders to the stage

As a stand-up comedian, Nigel Williams has been blessed by events. Last year he did a show called Geloof mij! (Believe Me!) about religion, just in time to catch revelations of abuse in the Catholic Church. His new show is Working Class Hero, just as the world is catching light from the sparks of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

We meet in his regular Antwerp haunt not far from the Groenplaats, a couple of hours before Occupy Antwerp, reinforced by some visiting indignados, is about to rally there. Last time we spoke, he was still recovering from a pulmonary embolism. Now he’s back on form, slightly tired after filming a night shift at a vegetable market for the TV programme Volt, but still with the roguish twinkle in the eye that betrays his 57 years and his never-ending schedule.

The new show, which premiered last month and will continue touring into 2012, isn’t really about class at all.

“In Belgium, you’re not confronted with a class system. We come from the working class, but now we’re middle class,” he says. “I think everyone in Belgium is pretty much middle class; that’s the first thing I realised when I came to live here. Obviously, there are the poor, but there’s not that canyon between them and the middle class. You can still see the other side.”

Williams was born in 1954 and grew up in Patchway, just outside of Bristol in southwest England. Mother stayed at home to look after the 13 children, and Father worked for the railways. He provides the quote Williams uses to launch the show, the encapsulation of his political philosophy. “Mum would cook the dinner, and Dad would put it in the middle of the table and say, tuck in everyone, but remember only to take your fair share.”

On-stage indignado

Williams left school at 16 and went to work for British Aerospace. When the company started laying people off, he volunteered to go so that those with more need of a regular wage had a better chance. He came to Flanders in the late 1970s on the advice of a friend and worked in a factory in Mechelen and later at Opel Antwerp, where he became a shop steward in the socialist ABVV union.

He learned to speak Dutch on the factory floor, as you can hear when he speaks: fluent vernacular Flemish full of street-slang, the accent a mix of Antwaarps and his original West Country English burr. He’s performing Working Class Hero in both Dutch and English, depending on the night.

A week previously, Williams travelled to Brussels for a march by the same indignados. “I don’t know what to think about it,” he says. “There’s all kinds of people there, hippies and yuppies, a little group of communists and all these Spanish people dressed as clowns. It’s certainly confused the politicians because it’s not about Left or Right. They’ve got no slogan about what they want, just what they don’t want, which is okay. It’s a sort of bucket protest, bring whatever you’ve got. Just go along and shout some shit and then go home. You feel like you’ve done something.”

Indignado would be a good word to describe Williams’ act, which doesn’t consist of jokes as such. He’s not really a storyteller, either. Instead, he delivers a series of ever-increasing narrative loops that end up completing one giant circle. What seems to be an endless series of digressions, soon all makes sense. This bit has led you up the garden path in order to approach the next bit from an unexpected angle, so you can see it from a new viewpoint.

“I’m not aware of that structure when I’m putting it together, but I am after I’ve been doing it for awhile,” he says. “Once you go on stage – I won’t say it’s like a trance, but you’ve got to think so fast, you just do it.” Despite how that description sounds, his act is uproariously funny. He’s particularly good at interacting with members of the audience; at the premiere were at least three who bounced ideas with him back and forth.

“I always look for a few faces who might be up for it,” he explains. “If I talk to somebody , and I see fear in their face, I leave them alone. I’m not there to take the piss out of people. Though sometimes you get people who want to be the centrepiece, and they won’t shut up!”

“Confrontation is my thing”

The show premiered in the Arenberg theatre in Antwerp in front of a fairly well-heeled crowd of Antwerp urbanites. Williams shares the stage with only a stool, a bottle of water and a microphone for two sets of 50 minutes each. The show is preceded by a video of his rendition of “De gewone werkmens” (The Ordinary Worker), a Dutch version of Britpop band Pulp’s “Common People”, with lyrics by Flemish columnist Patrick De Witte.

In the show, Williams’ targets include: politicians and bankers, Walloons, the British, Dutch cabaret artists (with a killer imitation of Herman Van Veen), people who send hate mail, nationalists of every stripe, celebrity chef Peter Goossens (another hilarious imitation), the Japanese tsunami and the Pukkelpop disaster.

The latter two subjects are raised to make a point about comedy: The further away from us a tragic event takes place, the sooner we can joke about it. The Pukkelpop line is more of a wry observation than a joke, but the sharp intake of breath from the audience suggests his calculus is accurate: It’s too soon and too close to home.

Otherwise, the audience is with him all the way – regardless that he’s inviting them to laugh at themselves. “Confrontational stuff is my thing,” he confirms. “I used to go up and tell loads of jokes. There are formulas for making jokes; it’s not that difficult. But it got so boring, I thought I can’t do this for the rest of my life. So I stopped doing that. But then you have to create a new audience, and I’ve only just started doing that.”

Flemish Brit or British Flem?

The secret of his success lies in being an outsider. In Working Class Hero he makes much of the fact that for many Flemish people he’ll always be an outsider, regardless if he’s lived here longer than many of his critics have been alive. He also, he stresses, came to live here by choice, unlike most of those who are critical of his act.

And he is grateful to be here. “Maybe I should add to it. Flanders has been like my adopted family, so I know the good things about it; I shouldn’t just be hammering on the bad points. But that’s funnier. I should make it clear I also find the Brit mentality very confusing. You see that in Brussels when you get a group of Brits. Do I belong to that tribe? I don’t think so.