Jack Shepherd’s play is simply
too accurate. A kind of elegy for
the old British variety circuit, set just as it was falling prey to
broadcast and pop cultures in the 1950s, the play is itself of a type
that has gone out of fashion. It is a work of modest yet serious
ambitions, aiming not for revelation or revolution but, in a nutshell,
to fulfil Lord Reith’s principles for the early BBC: to inform, educate
and entertain.
We see a day and evening backstage at a variety theatre in Leeds. A new
headliner, a radio-popular chanteuse, has been parachuted in over the
established, drunken, hell-raising comic, leaving the long-suffering
theatre manager to explain this to the furious funny man; the
second-string comedian gains respite from his domineering wife by
flirting with a dancer; half of the musical double-act is having a
breakdown; the Watch Committee (the local board of censors) are in the
house, and the speciality act has never been all there to begin with.
The row about billing and who has the No 1 dressing room becomes
(thoughtfully, but none too subtly) a series of meditations on culture,
commerce and class. Singer Janey wonders whether people buy her records
because they like them or merely because they have been conditioned to;
comic Reg bellows that his audience love him because he is of their
stock and speaks to their experience of poverty combined with dignity
and even defiance.
Nicky Henson’s touring production for Love & Madness is not
entirely at home in the wide, low Arcola space, playing in one corner
with the seating arranged in a way that maximises distance from the
stage whilst all but minimising visibility. But the cast of eight work
well, with the role-doublings structured so as to be enjoyable in
themselves. Author Shepherd takes the unshowy role of the manager;
long-time associate Jim Bywater relishes every aspect of Reg, from the
three-sheets-to-the-wind acting to the yelling and even to the
unflattering full nudity. Ultimately, though, that echo of Reithism is
significant: this feels like a 1970s one-off TV play
manqué. Shepherd is a man of
unimpeachable integrity, with a golden thread of pure and simple
giving-a-damn running through all his work; alas, in this too he may
now be out of his time.
Written for the Financial
Times.