What Lenny's got to say

What on earth has happened to Lenny Henry? He has always seemed so affable, so easy-going. He's known for his portrayal of affable, easy-going characters. Yet here he is today, in a rather claustrophobic room at his management company, acting like a bear with a sore head.

"I'm late," he says. It's fine, I tell him. "No it isn't," he growls at me, as if it's my fault. He tells me he's in terrible pain. He doubles up his huge, 6ft 4in frame. "I've got a groin injury," he says, grimacing. "This always happens. Any time something major in my life is about to happen I get sick. It's psychosomatic. I know it is. But what can I do?"

The major event that's about to happen is that for the first time in his 30-year career he is doing a West End show. Why hasn't he done one before? "Never been asked," he says simply. "Don't know why."

Maybe it's because he plays such safe characters, which is rather odd because, in real life, Lenny Henry couldn't be further removed from them. He is far less predictable than the wide-boy Delbert or randy pensioner Donovan Bogarde. He's funnier, for a start. He has a cracking, fizzing wit that explodes out of nowhere. He conjures voices from midair. He tells random jokes. He mimics just about everybody he meets. He'd be seriously amusing if it were not for the fact that he also seems rather highly strung, defensive and tetchy. Maybe it's because of the pressure of the show. Maybe it's because of the groin strain. Maybe it's just the way he is.

There's also something else, though. That unspoken something else. His depression. He has barely talked about it before. But it is true that he has been depressed. "What's wrong with that?" he says. "How could I have possibly got to the age of 45 and said, 'well, actually, I've had a lovely life and everything's fine ...' I had the classic male mid-life crisis. You know: what's my life about?"

This seems to have been brought about by many things. For a start, in 1999, he'd gone through the trauma of having his adored mother, Winnie, die after seven years of excruciating pain. What was wrong with her? "What wasn't wrong with her. She was a double amputee. She lost her legs because of diabetes. She had pains everywhere. She suffered from asthma and had heart problems. We used to look after her but then we had to put her in a home."

He feels, naturally, very guilty about this. When he was a child, growing up in Dudley, his father, Winston, died in 1977, and his mother worked tirelessly in a factory to provide for her seven children. She sounds a bit of a card.

"She was known back in Jamaica, where both my parents came from, as The English Woman," says Henry. "She had picked up so many mannerisms." He also says that, as a born-again Christian, she wouldn't go to his shows in case there were rude bits.

"Sometimes she'd watch backstage. She had a huge effect on me. I loved and admired her." After he lost Winnie, he says, he lost the plot a bit. "It was very hard. I suppose I just seesawed down the wrong way for a while."

It seems that work has seen him through past crises. After Winnie's death he wrote his show Have You Seen This Man? as a poignant tribute to her. "I thought it might be self-indulgent," he says. "But it was very cathartic. I wanted to remember her and tell other people about her." Conversely, though, part of his seesawing downwards also meant he had to stop working so hard when his marriage to comedian Dawn French hit crisis point.

In the same year his mother died, Henry allegedly spent a night with Australian receptionist Merri Cheyne after a gig in York. He has always denied any impropriety. "I was tired," he says. "I was working too hard. Ask Dawn. I was on the road 300 nights out of 365. I was doing films and Live Aid and sitcoms. I can get very self-involved when I am working and not see the things that are staring me in the face. When I see my family it's great because I have to do normal things. I wasn't doing any of this. It was tough on Dawn."

Anyway, he says, the work had got out of hand and he was bringing his neuroses home and then he snapped. "I became very emotional and tired so I decided to go to the Priory and it was great. Some people go because they need help. Some people go to recharge their batteries. I did the latter." He says he then came home and made a commitment to his wife and adopted daughter, Billie, now 11. "I'm at home more often now," he says. "I help Billie with her homework. She's lovely, but all kids are hard work. I needed to spend some time with her and Dawn and just get on with everything."

I ask why he and Dawn had adopted only one child. "Why? Do you think we should have more than one child?" he says rather crossly. "What's wrong with one? It's not as if all of us should go out and have more and more babies. Who says Billie's lonely without a sibling? We were going to get another one [Get another one? I wanted to ask. Is this how you seriously see the lengthy adoption process?] when Billie was four but then ... we were so tired. We just never got around to it."

He seems to see his life in phases. There was the "young boy who made his friends laugh". That was when he was growing up and appearing on New Faces in 1975, which he won, aged 17. "I didn't tell my mum I'd gone for an audition. When she found out she was amazed. She wouldn't let me back in the house until I'd shown her my act."

Then there was the five years spent touring with the Black and White Minstrel show. "Yeah, I need therapy for that one," he says. What was it like, being the only black man travelling with white men who blacked-up every night? "What do you think it was like?" he snaps. "It was awful." None of his family and friends would go to see him perform. "They were all far too embarrassed," he says. After that, he did a tour with Cannon and Ball, then, one night in London, he ended up in the Comedy Store.

"I was blown away," he says. "It was the early Eighties and the beginning of alternative comedy. I saw Dawn and Jennifer [Saunders] perform their stuff and I thought they were amazing."

Something in him fundamentally changed that night. "I became a comedian," he says. "Up until then I'd been this light entertainer. I had flares and a frilly shirt. I did mother-in-law jokes and I wasn't even married. I did impressions of wellknown black people, not that there were that many. I ached to do something else. So when I realised that you could do stand-up and have that type of relationship with the audience - well, it changed my life."

Did he feel he was on the fringes of something he was not part of? "Of course I did. They all seemed very cool - Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson. I was a mimic then, not an actor, not a comic."

But he and Dawn, who married a year after they met, are now, surely, part of the comic royalty? "We live a quiet life in Berkshire," he says. Does that bother him, not being in the thick of things? "No," he says quickly. "I think the opposite. Sometimes I think that my head's too up in the clouds. That I've got lost within myself. Comedy is my life. It's very obsessing.

I mean, I can't do the hoovering when I'm thinking of sketches. Sometimes I need to be brought back down to earth or else I could get ..." What? Arrogant? Unbearable? "Lost," he says.

I think about Henry after we part; about how he seems complicated and a bit elsewhere. He is useless at small talk. When I told him I had a baby called Lenny he said: "Oh." When I told him I lived near where the Vicar of Dibley is shot - starring his wife and very near his home - he said: "Oh." Nothing much seems to connect.

That night I watch his video, Lenny Henry In Pieces, and it occurs to me that he just isn't that funny. He's vaguely amusing. He'd hate to be called that. But maybe that's what he means when he told me he's moved on, creatively speaking. "I want to get back on stage and see where my mind goes," he says. Now that really should be interesting.

So Much Things To Say opens at the Wyndhams Theatre on 10 November.