Goodness Gracious George

PUBLICATION DATE 10 OCTOBER 2011
Written for londonist.com




After the press night of The Killing of Sister George starring Meera Syal, intrepid Londonist reviewers JohnnyFox and Zefrog hid in a wardrobe in the dressing room shared by characters Alice McNaught (Childie) and June Buckridge (George) as they fought over their postmortem of the night’s performance. Here’s what they may have heard:

Childie: oh come on, George. It wasn’t that bad, the critics are not going to kill the play. People seemed to enjoy it and they did laugh, even if the theme can seem a bit heavy-going.

George: are you insane, Childie? We’re no longer relevant to contemporary dramatic discourse: post-Tipping The Velvet, lesbianism doesn’t have the shock factor and the plot about my dismissal from a BBC radio series is about as exciting as a Clare Balding outside broadcast from the Lord Mayor’s Show.

Childie: you have to admit that the play has probably set the tone for lesbian representation on stage and screen right up to this day. Do you think that’s why it’s so difficult to tell what period the action is supposed to take place? I mean, between the anachronisms in the language and the clothes I am not quite sure whether I am supposed to be in the 1950s or in a Hoxton loft in 2011. I do like the set, though. It was clever of Ciaran Bagnall to include that giant radio speaker in the backdrop. My dolls just love it!

George: The set’s fine, but no more accurate than the costumes by Pam Tait: my Blundstone boots weren’t seen much outside Australia till the 80′s but I thought Mrs Mercy [Belinda Lang]’s suits were as elegant as her finely-tuned performance, an autocratic BBC vixen to the fingertips of her calfskin gloves. Pity about Madame Xenia [Helen Lederer]. Was she meant to be Ukrainian?  The accent travelled from Gdansk to Vladivostok. Via Leeds. And what a clunky overacted performance, it was Calendar Girls all over again.

Talking of accents, Miss McNaught, given that you’re Scottish why do you speak pure Brummie ?

Childie: Oh yes, Mrs Mercy! Isn't she lovely? And sooooo nice!

George?

George: What?

Childie: Don’t you think we could make a bit more of that scene at the beginning when you make me eat the end of your cigar? I mean, for us it’s nothing unusual, you trying to humiliate me, but it’s the first time the audience becomes aware of it and I feel we could do much more  – making it real dramatic and all.

George: I told director Iqbal Khan that George needed to be more menacing. It’s not sufficient just to wear trousers and take longer strides to emphasise her angry masculinity, for the play to pivot on whether or not she’ll go ‘over the edge’ we needed to get closer to her psychotic neuroses: unfortunately he’s read Rebecca West but I saw her more as Rose.

But you’re right about the cigar.  I’ve finished it now, so get on your knees and eat my butt.

Debs' Delight

A social-climbing middle-class Home Counties couple launch their pretty but awkward daughter on the London marriage market and eventually steer her towards the ‘right’ public schoolboy with a title to inherit …

… but enough about the Middletons.

In The Reluctant Debutante, it’s 1957 and the pushy mother is Jane Asher in a series of Butterick shirtwaisters pleading brightly into the Bakelite telephone to beg a series of MAYfair and SLOane numbers to come to dinner. Thanks to her vagueness she dials a wrong number and invites a ‘dark’ bounder rather than the Tim-Nice-But-Dim she’d targeted, but two and a quarter hours later the bounder inherits a dukedom and so turns out to be the right sort after all.

I wanted to write a scathing dissertation about the inappropriateness of snobbish and mildly racist comedy in a post-20th century theatrical brave new world but firstly the excellent Jem Bloomfield has already done it for Suite101.com and secondly I found this revival rather beguiling.

Although born to the purple and a sibling of a future Prime Minister, William Douglas Home didn’t fit the Tory mould and was something of a maverick, joining several different political parties but finding none of them met his aversions to authority and convention. The Reluctant Debutante is a satire, and his opinions about the ridiculous ‘social season’ as an expensive cattle market for middle-class parents ‘one step away from white slavery’ are voiced through Clive Francis’s drily perfected portrayal of the jaded father of the bride-to-be.

Drawing room comedies are valuable because they sowed the seeds of the most durable entertainment vehicle of the age: the television situation comedy, where domestic misunderstandings and trivial accidents are heightened to melodramatic effect in a chain of events from early The Marriage Lines or Terry and June to 30 Rock and Peep Show.

The audience certainly responded to the sitcom format of the script with enthusiasm, and this is a tribute to the fact that the entire cast plays it straight. In the recent Blithe Spirit at Richmond, a drawing room comedy of similar vintage, director Thea Sharrock encouraged the cast to overact it rather than rely on the script to entertain. Reluctant Debutante works better because Belinda Lang has the sense to let the lines and situations speak for themselves.

Asher, Francis and Lang herself are old hands at this sort of thing and their performances are consistently good although Lang’s own ‘turn’ as Mabel Duchess of Claremont borders on caricature and if someone else had been directing might have been tamed.

The ‘gels’: daughter Jane (Louise Calf) and her friend Clarissa (Lucy May Barker) are serviceable performances, but the two young suitors played by Alex Felton and Marlborough-educated Ed Cooper Clarke are excellent. Cooper Clarke is particularly good at the romantic suavity required of his ‘bounder’ character, and may remind you of a young Rupert Everett or Hugh Grant.



Don’t let mental images of Hugh Grant put you off, this is an enjoyable evening.


This review written for The Public Reviews