SAND IN THE SANDWICHES

SAND IN THE SANDWICHES

at the Playhouse, Salisbury
23.11.2016

Alan Bennett looks increasingly like Betjeman's natural heir. And Hugh Whitemore's elegiac entertainment has more than one resonance: Edward Fox's rich voice – no more like Sir John's than his dapper linen-suited persona – is very like the patrician, academic tones that Bennett favours in pastiche. His “north of the Trent” town clerk, too, with “Bournemouth's looking up”. Not to mention the “grapefruit drying on the after-dinner speaking circuit. Both writers confess to a love of church-crawling, life on the film set, with its camaraderie and arcane jargon - “hair in the gate” …

Set in what could be a summer house, this 90 minute monologue is a shared delight; Fox's eyes are often screwed up in mirth, laughing, as Sir John did, immoderately at his own bons mots. And there are plenty of those, some new to me [the du Maurier limerick], some very familiar [Churchill on Tom Driberg's bride, a naughty Max Miller rhyme].

Names are casually dropped – pale green intellectuals and fin-de-siecle pederasts – Eliot, Auden, Blunt and Waugh, C S Lewis, Osbert Lancaster, Elizabeth Jane Howard. And of course there are the poems – Joan Hunter Dunn, Summoned by Bells, Dorset, Devonshire Street W1.

A disappointment to his father, Moth to Oscar's Bosie, delighting in old books - “through leaves” and London's Music Halls, [all but Wilton's, which he helped save from the wreckers, now vanished] – a “fascinating study to the world”.

Fox got a round on his entrance – life-time achievement applause, perhaps. But his affable, engaging performance certainly merited an ovation; this has been a long tour, but he appeared to be enjoying each anecdote and reminiscence afresh – a generous touch of genius on the Salisbury stage.

We used to picnic where the thrift

Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
Below us, till the wind would lift
Them up the cliff and o’er the hedge.
Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,
Sun on our bathing dresses heavy with the wet,
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,
Fleas around the tamarisk, an early cigarette.

There was a young lady named Gloria

Who was had by Sir Gerald Du Maurier,
        And then by six men,
        Sir Gerald again,
And the band at the Waldorf-Astoria.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

at the Mercury Theatre Colchester

01.06.2015

for The Public Reviews

This cult musical is a cultivar of the 1960 Corman film; from modest origins off-Broadway, it has grown into a major industry, with community groups drawn to its catchy tunes and off-the-wall story. Specialist plantsmen supply the various Audrey IIs, from dwarf to magnifolia.

You'd wait a long time to see a more perfect specimen than this joint production with the Mercury's Wiltshire twin, the Salisbury Playhouse, the work of its Artistic Director Gareth Machin.

Everything about it feels absolutely right. James Button's fantastic design, inspired in part by the street photography of Vivian Maier turns Skid Row into a three-storey slum, with Richard Reeday's band on the first floor above the shop. The subway rumbles beneath, while a corrugated curtain flies out to reveal the eponymous shop, which begins as a fly-blown failure and blossoms into Mishkin and Son.

The staging is full of ingenious ideas: the snapper and the hooker, the two clocks, the four phones, the bins, the magazines, the newspaper with the total eclipse on its front page and the faded poster for Attack of the Puppet People, another cult schlock horror classic. The costumes are clever too, embracing the “cheap and tasteless outfits” of the 1950s: the skirt of roses, the leopard-skin sling.

The excellent vocal trio – a grungy Greek chorus – branch out from “worthless ragamuffins” to plant-costumed backing group and botanical operatives taking the cuttings which will propagate this strange and unusual plant world-wide.

Crystal, Chiffon and Ronette - Gbemisola Ikumelo, Karis Jack, Carole Stennett – are a key part of this production, their numbers superbly choreographed by Nick Winston. They pop up in the gutter, on the balcony, out of the drains to tempt Seymour in Suppertime.

She's played by Frances McNamee, with a great vocal presence and a winningly vulnerable look in her Fay Wray nightgown.

Simeon Truby makes a wonderful Mushnik, and Jez Unwin is not only the rebel dentist in leather, with his quiff and 'tache, a glorious hybrid of Elvis and Vincent Price, but also, in quick succession, Bernstein, Martin, and the wife of the editor of Time Magazine. Ben Stott is an exquisite Seymour: slight, speccy, his every movement speaking volumes.

The three carnivorous plants are impressive, too, voiced by Leon Craig and animated by Andrew London. Tapping its feet to the Senior and Junior Schtick, grabbing its prey, turning its head knowingly, belching when Seymour finally succumbs.

The whole show feels almost operatic [in a good way], with the cast squeezing every last drop out of Ashman's book and Menken's music.

I half expected the height of the set to be used to make Audrey II tower like a beanstalk – instead, in a much more effective finale, singing clones appear on the upper levels and, as in the 1982 original, suckers drop down over the audience, threatening to devour all these enthusiastic young theatre-goers bathed in a ghastly leafy-green light ...

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews