Worst Play of 2012 ?

Funny Peculiar – Richmond Theatre, London

Writer: Mike Stott

Director: Bob Tomson

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

It’s been an extraordinarily busy week for ex-Coronation Street stars in London theatres: Becky Macdonald (Katherine Kelly) just came to the end of her highly-acclaimed run in the National’s magnificent She Stoops to Conquer which proved she’s rinsed out her Rover’s apron for the very last time, and is secured as a star of the legitimate stage. Cilla Battersby-Browne (Wendi Peters) headed the first-rate cast of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and is set to become a genuine West End Wendi with its imminent transfer to the Arts.

Now it’s time to catch up with Les Battersby’s first wife, the redoubtable Janice (Vicky Entwistle) paired with Corrie’s own idiot-savant Graham (Craig Gazey) whose awkwardly off-beat philosophising was such a delight in the Street. It’s that gauche but lovable naivete that he tries to deploy in recreating the role of Trevor Tinsley, small town grocer and frustrated romantic originally played by Richard Beckinsale in Mike Stott’s 1976 comedy.

The trouble is that time has moved on, and things we found Funny in the 70s are now merely Peculiar.

The play is set in an unnamed Pennine town, on an incomplete composite set of corner shop and the flat above – most ‘action’ takes place by the characters coming in and reciting it.

The first ten minutes feature an unfortunate gay vicar who hangs himself from his own bell-tower rather than face down the prurient bigotry of his neighbours, and the dialogue is mostly of the “the poofter did WHAT?” variety. Then follows an extended episode in which much ribaldry occurs at the expense of a young man with learning difficulties, with lewd references to his lack of sexual experience.

No wonder the audience didn’t laugh at all for the first half hour.

For the same reasons the sitcom Love Thy Neighbour written in the same era can no longer be broadcast because the white and black characters called each other ‘nignog’ and ‘paleface’, Mike Stott’s script is simply inappropriate for modern production. It doesn’t even have the period quality and social observation of an Abigail’s Party and belongs in the same sitcom dustbin as On The Buses.

In a wholly implausible plot which I’ll recite in order to save you the bother of seeing this, Trevor shags a customer (Gemma Bissix) whose husband (Sam Nicholl) doesn’t really mind but his wife (Suzanne Shaw from pop group Hear’Say and simply dreadful in the role created by Julie Walters) does and – after he has played out his frustrations by smashing two dozen cream puffs over the stage in a ludicrous slapstick with the bread man and some wholly superfluous slack-buttocked nudity – she goes and sleeps with the customer couple. Trevor follows her, and they all agree to move to the country in a free love commune.

When a play is a bad as this, there can scarcely be a saving grace but if there is, it’s Vicky Entwistle playing busybody neighbour (and mother of the retarded boy) Mrs Baldry in Ena Sharples’ old coat, a bad wig and a cheap nightie.

Although when she strips off to the nightie and asks Trevor to “love” her, I had to watch through my fingers.

Written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published on 25 April 2012

As Dicks Go, It's fairly Dandy ...

Dandy Dick – Richmond Theatre, London

Writer: Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

Director: Christopher Luscombe

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

A well-known critic messaged me to “avoid Dandy Dick at all costs” … based on his experience of the Brighton opening. He wasn’t alone in condemning it, several broadsheets found it a weak and unnecessary revival, and Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail caught himself laughing ‘in spite’ of his reservations about the play.

For the avoidance of doubt, and lest anyone think this comedy is anything less than clean as a whistle, Dandy Dick is a racehorse.

Its author Arthur Wing Pinero was a close contemporary of both Shaw and Wilde but whilst his plays were once as popular as theirs, they contain no polemic or universal relevance and have survived by occasional ‘rediscovery’ rather than through constant revivals. Because he entertained Victorian audiences more than challenging them, Letts called Pinero ‘the Alan Ayckbourn of his day’ which is unkind but accurate.

Dandy Dick is a farce about religious hypocrisy. With the current conflicts between Church and politics, it could be seen as quite relevant nowadays but Christopher Luscombe’s production is steeped in a more classical farce tradition traceable back through Brian Rix, Ben Travers and Feydeau to Pinero who is credited with inventing the genre in England. The direction’s briskly-paced and authentic without being silly, no trousers are dropped and no vicars harmed in the making of this production.

Nicholas Le Prevost plays Augustus Jedd – a rural Dean whose sermonizing is mostly against gambling and for the church restoration fund, when he receives a hot tip for a racehorse from his sister Georgiana played by Patricia Hodge, an extrovert, equine, thigh-slapping virago not a million miles from Fiona Shaw as Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance, recently revived at the National. When she parks both herself and her horse in the Deanery, Augustus is caught up in a maelstrom of accusations of race-fixing, doping and improper sexual advances to a policeman’s wife.

I suspect the performances have stepped up a gear since Brighton and now both lead actors drive this farce with conviction: Le Prevost still seemed to be struggling occasionally with the highly convoluted text, but has splendid moments of frustrated confusion and stands well on his clerical dignity without ever seeming pompous. Hodge plays Georgiana nicely distanced from the taint of ‘Miranda’s mother’ and pitches her characterisation just shy of tapping her boots with a riding crop but clearly relishes having some of the best lines.

Like much Victorian comedy, Dandy Dick trades on class distinction and the ‘rustics’ revel in their below stairs characters, Rachel Lumberg outstanding as the former Deanery cook now married to determined local policeman Matt Weyland, another fine comedy performance.

A couple of the cast play piano and violin and the punctuation and scene-changes with musical interludes add a layer of extra charm. It’s undemanding, but a very enjoyable evening particularly in the beautiful Richmond Theatre built within twelve years of the first performance of Dandy Dick.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 11 July 2012

A Gay, Old, Time

Radio Times – Richmond Theatre, London

Music: Noel Gay

Book: Abi Grant and Alex Armitage

Director: Caroline Leslie

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

You’ve never heard of Reg Armitage from Wakefield, have you? Much less heard that he was one of Britain’s most prolific composer-lyricists in the years between the two World Wars or that Sheridan Morley described him as the nearest thing Britain had to a home-grown Irving Berlin. Changing his name to Noel Gay didn’t really help his long-term career either, despite writing Me and My Girl, in 1945 the longest running musical in London. A shift in popular musical taste and the early onset of deafness combined to limit his output, although fortunately not before he wrote the music for Radio Times.

Not, please note, ‘the musical’, as this is a compilation of songs from his back catalogue which were first assembled by TV sketch writer Abi Grant for a 1992 West End production starring the comedian Tony Slattery and Kathryn Evans and featuring deliberately corny jokes and a vintage plot.

It is appropriate that Gay’s grandson, Alex Armitage, has revised Radio Times for this production and also that it’s set in 1940, when his chirpy Cockney melodies best chimed with the times. We’re in the Criterion Theatre which being underground has been turned into a recording studio for the duration, and from which the BBC is broadcasting its popular ‘Variety Bandwagon’, closely modelled on Tommy Handley’s ITMA or Arthur Askey’s Band Waggon, for the first time to the USA.

Since this is a show from the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, the formula will be instantly recognizable – there’s no orchestra pit and the cast members all play instruments: it’s becoming increasingly a requirement that acting schools turn out attractive young performers who can act, sing and in the case of the four brilliant young women in this ensemble, play brass or woodwind and tap at the same time.

At the centre of the piece is a deft performance from Gary Wilmot, a showman to his fingertips, with a knowing line in gentle double entendres that had the Richmond audience guffawing throughout, revelling in the nostalgia and blissfully ignoring the clichés in a sentimental love triangle between Wilmot, his long-term girlfriend and an imported ‘Hollywood Movie Star’.

There’s been a gearshift in casting since the wonderful Anna-Jane Casey played Olive, the girlfriend, at the Watermill itself and Sara Crowe takes the role for the tour. Hers is not immediately a name you associate with song and dance, and whilst she may have been having an off night, seemed both tonally and in energy to be slightly below the par for this otherwise excellent cast. Vivien Carter, as the “Radio Girlfriend” who can act, sing, dance and swing a tenor sax, completely outshines her.

The star turn, though, belongs to John Conroy playing the mellifluously-named producer Heathcliffe Bultitude who morphs from strait-laced martinet reminiscent of John Barron as Reggie Perrin’s boss ‘C.J’ and barking “The BBC is clearly no place for creative people” to stand-up comedian and impressionist when he has to take over for an absent guest star. A first-rate performance, Conroy should be on his way to playing Billy Rice in ‘The Entertainer’.

The songs have the bouncy cheerfulness that raised the spirits of people huddled in air-raid shelters, and still have the power to make you smile: a couple are given surprising freshness and invention in Paul Herbert’s arrangements: an a capella ‘Run Rabbit Run’ is particularly outstanding, and you’ll go home humming ‘Who’s Been Polishing The Sun’. Take your grandma, she’ll absolutely love it.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 7 November 2012

Pluckers

Review of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
4.5 stars
written for The Public Reviews



On the night an angry mob set fire to police cars and an Aldi supermarket in Tottenham it seemed wholly appropriate that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain should not just lead in to its set with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ but actively encourage the entire Richmond audience to sing along with such enthusiasm.

Of course if the Rocky Mountain campfire modulations of the Ukes’ version had been the inspiration behind a Tottenham disturbance, the hoodies might have been washing the police cars and taking their empty petrol bottles back to Aldi since it’s such a calming and elegant version of the song which as well as demonstrating their extraordinarily adaptable technique also shows up the real musicality of Pistols John Lydon and Glen Matlock who composed it.

The other thing to say about the Ukes is that theirs is an act to which you really can bring the whole family, and many did – a completely full house featured many nuclear groups of mum, dad and a couple of teenagers all of whom seemed to get something enjoyable from the show.

They’re an eight-piece band but since they’ve been together 26 years they must by now have paid holidays and a pension scheme because only seven made an appearance at Richmond. Their self-deprecating humour and deadpan delivery have become a trademark and adored by their many fans, but to the uninitiated this can feel rather like all your secondary school teachers coming together with a certain amount of reticence to perform for an end of term concert.

Because most of their orchestrations deliberately contrast with the music itself, each piece becomes a ‘name that tune’ session as the audience sighs or applauds with appreciation when it finally recognizes the song. Despite vociferous enthusiasm for all the material, there were moments of repetitiveness during which we amused ourselves by identifying the ‘lookalikes’ in the orchestra – including John Major, David Tennant, Joan Bakewell and Jo Brand, plus a massive bonus in the leader George Hinchliffe who is a dead ringer for former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, although for sure the Chancellor never impersonated Kate Bush as remarkably as George.

The individual vocals are variable, the men generally better than the women, but standout hits were a folky version of Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag, the theme tune to ‘Shaft’ and an outstanding 32-bar Limehouse Blues taken at the breakneck speed of duelling gypsy violins.

The group fights shy of paying homage to popular ukulele players like George Formby or Tiny Tim, but in their storming finale transformed Formby’s most popular song into a mournfully Russian, balalaika-orchestral, authentically Cossack dance which must henceforward be known as ‘Lenin on a Lamp-post’.

Leary

Michael Grandage’s production of Lear has had so many accolades from its run at the Donmar it’s unnecessary to chronicle them here. What is important is to say that if you want to see it you need to scoot to the Richmond Theatre before it disappears off to Cornwall and Brooklyn.

It’s not Shakespeare’s most accessible play, and being neither a fantasy nor a history falls in an almost unique category of being as realistic as possible about an ancient King of Britain without historical fact. Since it features a Duke of Cornwall inheriting much of the monarchy you could say it begs for updating but the conversational modernity and mediaeval-by-way-of-All-Saints costuming seems to suit the text. ‘Illuminated’ is a good adjective for the production because every actor strives for the meaning in the lines, and the setting is a fine bright white-scraped timber box beautifully lit by Neil Austin and underscored with atmospheric sound by Adam Cork.

There’s so much good in it: taut performances, a spanking pace (2h30 plus interval) some sexy effects both mechanical like the storm and acted when the putting out of Gloucester’s eyes is vivid, sadistic and totally thrilling theatre. The subsequent scene where he’s led to the brink of the cliffs is made even more touching by the intensity of his torture.

Does the central performance crown the effort? Yes and no. Because (apart from I, Claudius) Derek Jacobi has largely resisted television and film exposure and clung firmly to the boards this is possibly your last opportunity to see one of England’s finest theatrical knights strut his stuff in the tradition of Gielgud or Olivier. And it is quite strutting. His Lear captures the foolishness is his decision-making, his vanity and constant need for approbation and foregrounds the peevishness making it hard to see him as a great man, rather one in a high position marred by many human frailties. Again, you’ll be able to make modern comparisons from an historic, in many senses of the word, performance.


This review written for Londonist

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