UP IN THE
WARDROBE
at
the Broadway Theatre, Barking
22.02.13
Well,
it's a far cry from The Dresser. No tatty provincial touring
Shakespeare, but the hard-working wardrobe team at the Duchess in
1977, where the show is the iconic, seminal, but now largely
forgotten Oh Calcutta.
"You
never know who you're going to meet, up in the wardrobe," muses
Mina, Wardrobe Mistress, as the curtain falls. Under her stern
maternal eye, three foreigners, drawn to Seventies London, on the run
from their past, come and go.
Roberta
Michel's fifty minute sequence of scenes is based in part on her own
experience, as a dancer and as a dresser. Stripping bare is a key
metaphor.
Eleanor
[Zeynap Sandi], fleeing a divided Berlin, had auditioned for the
show, but refused to appear naked, so signs on for wardrobe, despite
not knowing how to iron a shirt.
Mo
[Steve Griffin], a plumply pretty blond from Rhodesia, grows a
moustache as camouflage but loves to dress up as Dorothy and is
convinced he was Marie Antoinette in a previous life.
And
Cal [Richard Igoe], from Little Rock, in his patched denim flares,
joins the company as a dancer but agrees to a lavender marriage with
Eleanor, giving her a Green Card and a passage to America.
But
the chat and the soul-searching reveal that no-one here is what they
seem. Unfair to spoil all the secrets, as this is a work in progress
with considerable potential. Suffice it to say that in the closets
lurk an oil-rich dynasty, the Prada-Meinhof terrorist tendency, Mau
Mau insurgents, the French resistance and Bletchley Park, with an
anachronistic nod to the martyrdom of Alan Turing.
Most
interesting of all perhaps, is mother-hen Mina herself,
sympathetically played by Kathy Trevelyan, who recalls being a stooge
to her beloved Harry, mentalist on the halls. Their mind-reading act,
topped off with a white-tie-and-tails dance, surely cries out for a
mirror-ball flashback moment. She too has her secrets, and can't
resist getting involved with the tangled lives of her protégés up
in the wardrobe.
Dylan
Keeling's production, down in the Barking Broadway Studio, has an
evocative setting, with ironing board, sewing machine, screen, and
all the paraphernalia of costume running repair. Little sense,
though, of frantic activity [think Wesker's kitchen], nor of the
fragile camaraderie which binds these characters together. Music is
well used – Sex Pistols, Lady Be Good, and Elvis, to whom there is
a makeshift shrine upstage, and whose Love Me Tender is an ironic
commentary on events.
Much
of the action, appropriately, is off stage. Not just the show, which
seems a bit of a burlesque in this reading, with glittery posing
pouch, a fronded thong, for our cowboy dancer, but the wedding, and
violent pursuits by skinheads and the police. One more potent symbol:
Archie, the ventriloquist's dummy. Like Eleanor, he lacks a voice of
his own, but makes a useful confidant, and eventually departs in her
luggage.
The
accents are variable – the least convincing Southern drawl ever –
and the pace a little slow, especially in this small space. And not
all the writing is convincing. But the piece, with its layers of
meaning and powerful central image, deserves to live on, maybe on
radio, a fascinating footnote to Tynan's revue, and the Seventies
that spawned it.
this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews
