Monthly Archives: January 2025

FUNNY ABOUT THE UNFUNNY

        Billy Bash,   rated the third most offensive comedian in Britain,  was once the dominant partner in Biddle and Bash.  He’s still on tour, God help us, and in his big white tux heading for one of our more dilapidated Spa Pavilions. First he’s dropping in on the other half of the act,  Cliff,  for reasons we will find out.   Cliff has not moved onward and upward to the Cheadle Hulme mansion set in the forty years since: designer Sarah Beaton has lovingly created every grimy smear and exhausted cushion in his maisonette beside the bitter Irish Sea. As he waits there Billy flicks contemptuously through an old showbiz journal.  “Dead. dead . dead. Cancer . Banged up for nonceing. Dead’.   He has prospered: after the fairly innocent postwar cheekiness of ‘The Whoopsie boys”,  duos like theirs were  driven off the air by the pious  Ben Elton revolution,   but Billy see-sawed defiantly back, to take the racial and sexist material further a la Bernard Manning. So he continues to delight the  substantial niche of unreconstructed louts who love him even more for being condemned by the Guardian and the BBC.   “Comedy’s not supposed to be nice! Real people want to laff again”

       Nigel Betts gives the role every bullying inch,  even when (for quite a lot of the play) he  is clearly on the edge of a serious cardiac event.  Like Jimmy Savile, Billy  is confident that his charity work (“kids’ hospitals, you look a right cunt if you don’t”) mean that he is in credit with God and the universe and will do just fine.  Meanwhile Edward Hogg’s Gulliver,  twisting with giggly camp self-abasement,  explains that he is the upstairs lodger who helps Cliff out: he will become a moving force later, in the elegantly twisted plot which I will not spoil.  But it’s Nigel Cooke’s Cliff who holds the play’s pleasingly appalled centre:  he first appears unexpectedly from the showbiz-red drapes in the shallow bay window,  a figure brilliantly and unsettlingly  weird beyond even our expectation in a tattered vest and cardigan,  goggling through thick specs, complaining that he’s been thrown out of the local Tabernacle for weirdness, and wondering whether his pet python Agadoo has escaped again.  After a while he nips out and reappears in a shabby Little Noddy outfit, yellow scarf and all, demanding a comeback. Perhaps a reprise – fully demonstrated to chokes of audience laughter – of his karaoke Kate Bush. You’ll rarely see a more bravura performance than Cooke doing that in a Noddy suit and shawl. But does he really want to face an audience ?   As Billy says “Stockton gasfitter’s social club – do you want to go through that again?” Cliff is inspiredly odd. And potentially very dark indeed, as is Gulliver. Something awful happened, fit for blackmailable memoirs, in their joint past. 

      The oppressive nature of the terrible double-act’s former relationship becomes clear through splendid banter along the lines of “Only way you’ll get inside a woman is with a donor card”.  At some point along the way we learn that Cliff’s decline was partly from an onstage injury at Billy’s hands, and partly because he was repeatedly arrested for indecency ( masturbating off the pier because “Rod Hull told him that’s how you get mermaids pregnant”). At some point he got religion after “Keith Chegwin talked to him about Jesus”.  

              Well , you get the references, and very entertaining they all are, names artfully chosen to be beyond legal complaint.   A decade ago Mark Jagasia used his background in tabloid journalism to give us the enjoyably terrifying CLARION here, with Greg Hicks as a barking-right editor.  I quaveringly described it as  the “howl of an England struggling without grace for identity, and a newsprint industry in decline”.  This author seems to be that rare thing,  a darkly observant, slightly pessimistic spirit who properly understands that the way to come at doubts and unease about your country is through comedy, provided you put the craft in and overlay the acid with half-shocked barks of audience laughter.  An ex-showbiz hack and product of that Blackpoolish north-west himself,  after a few years of explosive scandals he has hit on a good moment to dramatize the feeling that,  as he muses in the programme,  “there was always something a little weird and creepy about British light entertainment,  an intimation of darkness beyond the brightly lit pier”. 

And it’s come off beautifully. Though we may never know, in the final thunderstorm scene, whether the python was really imaginary. Oscar Pierce directs a remarkable three-man cast with killer precision create a two hour treat. Or as the director puts it,  a “dark-comedy farce absurdist satire gothic-horror revenge tragedy mystery play”.  

arcolatheatre.com. to 22 feb 

rating 4

A DARKER THOMAS CROMWELL 

        Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell is a proper thug:  everyone’s memory of the  HR-outplacement weasel who starts the sacking meeting with soft-soap about having always admired you;  the one who,  forced to drop one charge,  finds another. “It has to be done by law. It’s a matter of finding the right law. Or making one” he says firmly , while Sir Thomas More defies HenryVIII’s desire to have his divorce approved by the most decent man in court.     So,  fresh from Rylance breaking our heart in Wolf Hall on TV with as Hilary Mantel’s preferred  Machiavellian version of  “Crom”,  it’s a grand time for a moment of revisionism as  Jonathan Church revives this classic.   Robert Bolt’s celebrated play made Paul Scofield’s name in 1960,    scooped an Oscar  in the 1966 film and therefore has never quite gone away.   

        And watching this elegant production, framed by Simon Higlett in linenfold-panelling, glimpses of dungeon and artfully lit suggestions of the river beyond to Chelsea and Richmond, I kept thinking how very much it was of its time:  a product of the Cold War years of granitic Soviet persecutions.   It is a drily angry, passionate epic of personal conscience, loyalty and the uses and abuses of Law.  It suits our age very well,  reminds us of Alexei Navalny, Jamal Khashoggi and  others who did not bend conscience to tyranny.   Not to mention our global problems with free speech and thought; at one point the exasperated  Cromwell explains that Henry,  newly married to Anne Boleyn,    “is a man of conscience” – so can’t bear being disapproved of by anyone or the language they use.  His  Chancellor  must either explicitly bless his marriage,  or  be destroyed.  

         Martin Shaw is at the play’s heart as Sir Thomas More, a silver-maned lion, patriarch, lawyer and devout Christian who, from the first conversations with Nicholas Day’s pragmatic Cardinal Wolsey  clearly sees that Henry VIII’s determination to get a male heir by ditching his first wife is politically reasonable – without one the nation could split again, as in the Yorkist wars.  But divorce will lead inevitably to a rift with Rome and the whole ancient structure of the Church which  More has grown  in and believes to hold the truth.    Yet he thinks he is “not the stuff of which martyrs are made”,  and manages for a while to believe that there is safety in silence:  which of course there is not, since his passive-aggressive refusal to sign the Oath of Succession bring him down in the end.   And his family:  Abigail Cruttenden is a spirited Alice, his wife, Annie Kingsnorth their daughter; the domestic scenes  are beautifully achieved, whether the women are domestically  impatient over his  stubbbornness condemning them to “parsnips and stinking mutton“ and burning bracken on the hearth, or in the final jail scenes, which are heartbreaking.  

       The first half I admit dismayed me slightly:  it’s a slow-build by modern theatrical standards, but Bolt’s framing of all the story by The Common Man –  Gary Wilmot amiably moving from steward to boatman to  jailer in different hats  – gives moments of acerbic cynical realism to steer it along. And after the interval – which he informs us with a sigh covers two years of history – the tension mounts as it should. Building fear focuses ever more tightly around  More, moral  grandeur  shining  through outward destruction.   Shaw does more than justice  to the great polemic moments,  crumbling only to humility in the last prison meeting with his wife and daughter.  His timing is beautiful; the final reproof to the ratlike Rich (Calum Finlay splendidly evoking a courtier’s littleness)  produces one of the classic laughs of relief from the audience.  

        But all through there are some  wonderful minor lines that lift this intelligent, adult play to gaiety: mostly from the magnificent More himself, who is very dry at times,  but also in moments like the French Ambassador’s confrontation with Alice More:  a thwarted grunt of. “For sheer barbarity, commend me to an Englishwoman of a certain class!”.  Greg Wallace would understand.

         It’s touring for months – details below – and well worth finding.  And such in the end was the  reality to me  of Sir Thomas  that I  remembered something else:  his  last letter before  execution, written with charcoal on cloth as Cromwell  took away all his books and writing materials.  It  isn’t in the play,  but  offer to anyone who hasn’t met it before the lines to his daughter Margaret:  

       “Farewell, my dear child, and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven”.   

Box office theatreroyal.org.uk. To 25 Feb

TOUR DATES 

28 January – 1 February Chichester Festival Theatre
4 – 8 February Malvern Theatre
11 – 15 February Cheltenham Everyman
18 – 22 February Oxford Playhouse
25 – 29 February Yvonne Arnaud Guildford
4 – 8 March Canterbury Marlowe
11 – 15 March Richmond Theatre

 SUBURBAN ANGST IN THE NEW SA

There’s nothing like a tight, awkward comedy of neighbourhood strife, where neighbourly differences reveal unexpected fissures within the couples, and tiny points of lifestyle niggle, heat up and explode into wider issues of capitalism and power. . Think of GOD OF CARNAGE,  CLYBOURNE PARK,  or one of the darker TV sitcoms .   In such showed we expect – and here we ferociously get –  ludicrous but painful social distinctions, resentments, middle-class passive-aggression and the occasional burst of rage. Doing it right  takes deft acting and a particular kind of tightly-bottled sincerity of character.  These too are pretty well served here.

      It’s a South African suburb,  Stillwater.   A black couple  (Sifiso Mazibuko and Mimi M Khayisa) find themselves after living there two years suddenly befriended and entertaining one set of white neighbours.  Christopher and Lynette,  are reluctantly impressed that  the black hosts are sophisticates: Sihle is  a high-salaried finance man and they’ve been to Italy. Bonolo,  drifting around in a purple kaftan , pours the Merlot through an “aerator” and speaks of fine wine and the beauties of Sardinia.  The white visitors  (Kai Luke Brummer and Olivia Darnley) admit that their travel is generally to visit a sister in Swindon.  First top laugh from the Royal Court Audience there…. 

      They all try to be warm. And non-racist, and modern.  But there are glitches.  Christopher,  a mass of ‘white fragility’,  speaks of another white neighbour who hasn’t got promotion because “in this climate” there is a ceiling.  Though of course the rise of chaps like Sihle is “about time” .   The host, amused, taunts him a little.    It becomes apparent that the reason for the sudden rapprochement is that the white couple want to set up a neighbourhood group to protest against a newly erected shack on some waste ground down the road,  suspected of housing unseen squatters.  In Ultz’s teasing design the shack is always there in the background, tin-roofed but with obvious windows and door.   Not a good house, but a home..perhaps…which is threatening.  Another local suburb,  they fear, was  ‘overrun” with such shanty-town arrivals.  

    There’s a rather wonderful time-stops moment when, with the white couple still sitting unwitting on the sofa,  a slight lighting change shows  Khaysa and Mazibuko in their minds are rolling about hysterically laughing at the obviousness of the guests’ mission, and at the fact that “We’re black ! Black!  But we’re Insiders!”.  Back in conversation,  Christopher’s horrified description of how the cul-de-sac’s peace might be broken soon,   by a family of eight or ten crammed into the shack, cooking odd food and playing odd music.  Whereon Bonolo, their hostesll,  says that down in the Cape that could have described  her childhood . This later turns out not to be quite true.  Everyone likes to polish their own legend.

The action rolls on to a third couple, younger and poorer  and right next to the shack, where the young husband (Scott Sparrow) is almost hysterical with dread about it pulling down the house prices.  Mistaken identity and more moments of pass-ag and open rage follow.   

    Full disclosure:  at the height of apartheid in the early 1960s my Dad was posted to Johannesburg and I spent a year partly at a boarding school with some derangedly racist nuns, partly at home in the suburbs where next door’s kids were banned from playing with us because we swam and larked in the pool with the black servant’s kids.    So after watching over the years from afar the release of Mandela’, the ANC ’s rise to power and the joy and subsequent disappointments of South Africa,  I was mad keen to see Any Jephta’s play (in association with Bristol and the Johannesburg Market Theatre) for some kind of insight into how the new deal might work out at the basic ,social , black-next-door level. 

           For logistic reasons I nipped into the antepenultimate preview not press night.    So I won’t presume a star rating, though it was excellently played especially by Mazibuko.    But it did feel like a real, rueful insight into how it must be for both sides.    The black couple  for instance are slightly divided in attitude to the new worls: in his suit-and-tie Sihle has a  joshingly obliging determination to fit into what is still a white world and system, at one point admitting the strain of  constantly “performing it – performing my education, my salary”.   She is more activist,  take-back-the-land-for-my-people, but as her husband exasperatedly y points out you can’t be an activist while clinging on to your own privilege (a lesson for the world far beyond SA, indeed). 

        The white couples are not malicious but yes, fragile:   still finding  trouble accepting the change, uncomfortable in the “climate’` where they are awkwardly both members of the old oppressor-tribe and , sob, possible victims of antii-white discrimination.  Everyone is guarding their own boundaries.  And property.  Especially poor young Andrew (Sparrow) because he paid even more for his house than the older couples, and his ‘artisan sandwich’ business is not doing too well.     There is a surreal moment when they all stare at the shack,  and it starts growing in size and grandeur, sprouting a chimney and extension….   

     We , and they, never even see the shack people.  The invasion is all in their heads. But it still hurts.  “How much assimilation has to go on before that house is part of Stillwater`~~?”   . Lovely, funny, sharp, 100 minutes well worth spending.

ROYALCOURTTHEATRE.COM TO 8 feb

AT THE  SUMMIT OF RAGE AND HOPE 

       Fear not, this isn’t a Greta-gloom lecture but  a lively, imaginative, borderline wild reconstruction of  the years culminating in COP3 climate summit in 1997.    Kyoto was historic in the breadth of its final unity on a protocol to limit global warming, never mind that the years since have dented that agreement and we all woke this morning to some pretty bad figures.    Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson – backed by the RSC and Good Chance – make it well worth hearing the story of this furious, angry jigsaw of “diplomacy through exhaustion” .  After all it did achieve a signature from 150 nations,  some of whom had not previously heard of each other:  giant powers nonplussed by being challenged by tiny “stains on the map”, and being made to listen.   

      The brilliant dramatic twist is that ,as in Richard III ,the central figure and guiding narrator is the main villain:  climate-change-refusenik Don Pearlman,  lawyer and lobbyist for Big Oil.   Stephen Kunken is a marvel, spare and vigorous and lawyerly, clicking his fingers and striding  around the great table,  driving to despair his patient wife (Jenna Augen) as he prowls the summits over years,  watching and jeering and being taken aback.  

        The show is dense and big and excellent in its pace and pauses:  sometimes unbearably shouty , sometimes offering a sudden moment of awe. There’s a  Brazilian rainforest moment when Werner Herzog tips up with actors to annoy Pearlman,   and there’s that fragment from A Midsummer Night’s Dream about “distemperature…the seasons alter”;  suddenly our antihero grasps that the climate cause has become fashionable – “a brand, a movement,  an identity” not just a scientific squabble and one he might win through scorn and character-assassination.  The pre-Kyoto moment of Japanese stillness is beautiful too, cutting through the rage.  But the rage is grand too:  Andrea Gatchalian as the Pacific islands of Kiribati shouting “We will not drown in silence!”,  but also American Don asking “Is this what we fought the Cold War for, to be bossed about?” And more movingly calling on his Jewish-Lithuanian roots and the way America saved people and let them work and prosper.  

      On it goes, meeting after meeting until the big one,  wonderful rows about square brackets and nuanced words (“pledge” versus “aim”,  “discernable” versus “clear”).  Rows erupt over  targets and timetables,  cost in jobs and prosperity.    The question of America’s status and supreme rights is a hot one – wonderfully topical as President Trump Mk 2 approaches – and Aicha Kossoko asTanzania speaks for the developing world with withering scorn, pointing out to rich America and the West that “Your emissions are luxuries , ours are for survival”.   

        It’s grand ensemble work, but apart from Kunken  there are tremendous standout performances , notably Jorge Bosch as Raul Estrada-Oyuela, the indefatigable and decent chairman, and wonderful moments of miffed determination from Raad Rawi as Saudi Arabia and Kwong Loke as the permanently annoyed China delegate.   Our John Prescott has a splendid moment (|Ferdy Roberts) both complaining about the lack of lunch but then offering the real wisdom acquired in his ‘20s as a young seaman’s union negotiation:  you have to keep talking. Always keep talking.  In the end it works…just. Despite the darkly comic moment overnight at the end when the interpreters go off duty and ancient Babel overwhelms the great room in a terrible projected alphabet soup.   

     It’s an exhilarating evening, another slam-dunk for Nimax’s very cool new theatre.  And yes, Ed Miliband was there, two rows in front of me .  Joined the standing ovation: well, he would, wouldn’t he?

sohoplace.org. to 3 May

rating. five