The American No by Rupert Everett review – blackly comic short stories

The actor, writer and director mines his own backlog of unmade projects to create an exhilarating collection

Rupert Everett prefaces his suite of short stories with an account of the showbiz ruse that provides the title, a grim little routine whereby American film producers intoxicate a would-be screenwriter into feeling that a deal has been done, only to then forget them entirely. Will Everett’s readers offer up the English equivalent, murmuring “Darling, you were marvellous” before moving swiftly on? Well, the collection certainly delivers what Everett’s fans will be hoping for: quality time in his inimitable company. But it also delivers much more. Sometimes, it is simply the energy and poise of the prose that arrest one’s attention; often, it is Everett’s combination of studied carnality with an outlandish gift for invention. This is a storyteller unafraid to spike his black comedy with sudden and strongly brewed emotion – and vice versa.

In his frequent interjections, Everett is disarmingly frank about these stories’ origins. In 20 years of making pitches to TV and film producers, only one project of his has ever landed. This was his directorial debut, The Happy Prince, a meditation on Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace which got considerably more of Wilde’s rage and sorrow on to the screen than many more respectable versions (elements of the film are reworked in the second of these stories). But that was back in 2018, and these days, Everett’s phone isn’t ringing. A rainswept encounter with a former Soho contact sparks the idea that he could usefully bring some of his rejected ideas into a new kind of life. The result is intriguing, not least because these vivid little adventures aren’t really short stories at& all; they are scenes from unmade films, reimagined as prose.