The City Varieties in Leeds, Britain’s
longest-serving music hall, takes its brief seriously. It is best known
for 30 years of hosting the former nostalgia TV show
The Good Old Days, and it is
therefore fitting that the Red Ladder company’s latest stage
collaboration with agitpop merchants Chumbawamba should be “a music
hall comedy”. We see a succession of songs, comic sketches and other
variety acts such as escapology, magic and even an invisible monkey (it
makes a kind of sense in the show, honestly), interspersed with
backstage scenes among the performers. The comedian has a crush on the
soubrette, the escapologist puts herself
into chains as a Suffragette, and
everybody resents their common exploitation by the fat, rich manager.
As the traditional number has it, “It’s the same the ’ole world
over/It’s the poor what gets the blame/ It’s the rich what gets the
pleasure/ Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?”
Boff Whalley’s original songs, too, cleave strongly to the show’s
agenda that little has changed in terms of class, wealth and power
since 1910 when the action is set. The oft-reprised title number
parodies the Eton Boating Song to argue how little “we’re all in this
together”; the performers are persecuted by the hypocritically
moralising yellow press in the person of “The Man From The Double
Standard” (who is finally bested in an anachronistic black-light
fantasy sequence). Whalley and a quartet of other current and former
Chumbas provide period accompaniment including euphonium and banjolele.
Director Rod Dixon marshals a set of rollicking performances led by
Phill Jupitus as musical comedian George Lightfeather. Jupitus has the
music-hall touch in that he does not excel vocally, but puts his
numbers across with flair and assurance. There is something
conceptually amiss with a celebration of a raucous, boozy working-class
culture that doesn’t finish before closing time, and there is a slight
air (appropriately given the Chumbawamba dimension) of tubthumping, but
the point is well made, and made in that alas now unfashionable style
that unashamedly mixes politics and pleasure. An equally eloquent
demonstration of the argument is that under the last government, the
Varieties received council and Lottery funding for a refurbishment
costing nearly £10m; under this one, Red Ladder has lost 40% of its
Arts Council funding.
Written for the Financial
Times.