Tag Archives: theatre

I didn’t think much of the last Jonathan Harvey play I saw, Canary. Set-pieces haphazardly stitched together, trowel-loads of heavy handedness and nothing we hadn’t seen before.

With Corrie! we get the same again. The difference here is that it’s exactly what the audience wants: a romp through fifty glorious years of Coronation Street storylines. A chance to see again the most famous scenes unencumbered by the dodgy TV reminiscences of random celebrities and Paul Ross. And all with a knowing script that doesn’t take itself too seriously – like the show itself.

Like the show the play is dominated by strong female characters, from Elsie Tanner to Becky Macdonald and all tram stops in between. It focuses on the ones most commonly in man-trouble: Deirdre Hunt-Langton-Barlow-Rachid-Barlow and Gail Potter-Tilsley-Tilsley-Platt-Hillman-McIntyre. We see the major plot points in their lives, their downs and their further-downs – those characters not greatly blessed with extended periods of happiness – with stories for other characters slotted in alongside.

Almost all the characters you’d expect to see are here, ably impersonated by an impressively tiny and versatile cast. For me, the highlight is Ken Barlow: the actor captures Essence of Roache perfectly, almost uncannily at times. And while we can all trill Hilda Ogden’s Sound of Music when sufficiently lubricated, and might be able to drop a couple of octaves for a few angsty Deirdre classics, I doubt we could do as good a job as the actor playing the actor playing Gail.

The internet leads me to believe that the six main performers in the play portray a total of 54 authentic Corrie characters. That’s some feat. Happily they do so with humour and warmth rather than snark, and those of the actual soap’s actual cast who saw the play during its initial run in Manchester reportedly enjoyed it.

There’s a seventh performer on stage: a narrator, played by a gen-yoo-ine former cast member. It’s a guest role, with different cobble-wanderers lined up for stints as the show tours. For us it was Gaynor Faye, who played Judy Mallet for four years in the nineties. No, I don’t remember her either. Future guests include Ken Morley (Reg Holdsworth) and Roy Barraclough (Alec Gilroy).

There are some odd omissions from the line-up of characters. No Alf; no Norris; no Mavis; no Betty; no Battersbys; no Dev. But I guess the play’s only two hours long; it’s tricky squeezing 7500 episodes into one evening’s entertainment, even if most of the 1960s storylines were about Ena Sharples’ hairnet.

They manage to pack a great deal into the running time. Think of a famous clip, funny or sad, and chances are it’s here or at least referred to. Don’t think they’d be able to pull that one off? Think again!

Some of the set pieces, though, don’t work that well. I understand why Jonathan Harvey would want to break up the ‘straight acting’ with a ballet about Tony Gordon (seriously!) but it’s not, in all honesty, a story I cared for. For me, a funnier alternative would have been an opera about Fred Elliott and Ashley. And I can’t believe I just wrote that.

It’s easy to criticise soaps like Coronation Street and Eastenders for their relentless implausibility, their dilation of time and space, their murder rates and their inability to hold a wedding without a simultaneous catastrophe. But, for now at least, they are a core part of British culture – one of few remaining shared experiences, whether you watch or not.

The characters are like members of our (very) extended family. We know their foibles. We roll our eyes at Gail’s doomed attempts at romance, at Ken and Deirdre’s rows. We tut at the latest round of wife-swapping and twitch our televisual curtains at every bout of handbags on the cobbles. We cheer when someone gives birth to a three-month-old baby and mourn when much-loved characters pass on to the next world (Heartbeat).

The play works because we know and love the characters already. We don’t have to spend the first act trying to remember who’s who before deciding whether to empathise with them or not. Even if, like me, you’re not currently a habitual viewer of the soap, it’s impossible to grow up in this country without being at least peripherally aware of the characters in Corrie growing up with you.

I guess this makes Corrie! the play a massively elaborate cultural in-joke. Flamin’ ’eck!

Avaragado’s rating: no eclairs

I was too scared to come out in the 80s, too dumb to come out in the 90s, and already gaydead by the noughties, having hit thirty and therefore ceased to exist except in shadowy, wraith-like form – the film version would be called Logan’s Ring.

Jonathan Harvey’s new play Canary is no Logan’s Ring. It’s more Close Encounters of the Predictable Kind. Imagine a velvet bag full of the usual ‘gay drama’ tropes shaken and cast onto an Ikea coffee table and then transcribed directly into Final Draft and you’re 90% there.

Cliches are cliches because they’re true, of course, and the play is sufficiently true to life to spark a raw nerve once or twice – despite very little resemblance to my own history. It is, though, desperately predictable and hand-wringingly earnest.

There is a message, and the message is that gays have fought, and lost, and won, and lost, and won, and now are in danger of losing again. The story moves back and forth in time following a group of people as they struggle with events: the criminality of the 60s, the militant liberalism of the 70s, the confusion and fear of the 80s, and the complacency of the present day.

You will hardly be surprised to learn that AIDS features prominently. I confess I rolled my eyes when a character started coughing for no apparent reason; I half-expected a Pythonesque neon arrow labelled PLOT POINT to descend from the stage loft above him. This is a play with no time for subtlety.

We skip between eras so rapidly there is no chance to develop any character: the obvious things happen, and then we move on. Despite this some of these vignettes work well – the best feature ‘guest appearances’ from Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher – and I wonder whether the play started as a collection of sketches later stitched poorly together with Tesco Value plot threads.

The cast do uniformly well with what they’re given, all but one doubling or trebling up in different roles between which they switch with dizzying rapidity. Paula Wilcox, once a Liver Bird, plays scouse and Thatch. Ryan Sampson – a pocket thesp seen in Doctor Who a few years ago as an annoying American youth in the thrall of similarly pocket Sontarans – does well to slowly ramp up the camp in one role while also playing a striking 80s miner. Philip Voss (caution: 90s web design) drags up nicely as Mary Whitehouse; if only we could harness energy from her spinning grave.

The set is minimalist but very effective and necessarily versatile given the frequent scene changes and occasional periods in which two eras clash on stage.

I wanted to like the play, I really did. I enjoyed Harvey’s Beautiful Thing for what it was – a fairytale – despite the schmaltz. With Gimme Gimme Gimme and more recently Beautiful People he has modernised camp comedy on TV, even showing camp schoolboys without as far as I can tell incurring the wrath of the redtops. My disappointment with the play stems from the clunky stereotyping and plain lack of originality.

We are surely past the point where a gay play or film or TV show or soap plot is about gay rather than about people. Were this an educational piece for schools explaining the modern history of homosexuality in the UK it would be effective and might counter a deal of uninformed prejudice. As a night out for grown-ups who value character and plot and perhaps something new, unexpected and challenging, it’s lazy and, for me, it fails.

But hey, it has hot young actors in pants.

Avaragado’s rating: a small punnet of cherry tomatoes

Occasionally we like to inject a little high culture into our lives: move out of our comfort zones and do grown-up things. Like the theatre, for instance: a hard-hitting play, dark and modern, tackling a controversial subject.

And with nudity.

It was Louise’s idea to see Equus when the touring version hit the Cambridge Arts Theatre. She, Chris, Chef and I went along to Saturday night’s performance, Chris with customary Oasis bottle full of red wine. Chef chose to stay overnight at the University Arms, celebrating his new job and huge pay rise by splurging on a posh room.

We ate before the show at the Fountain, which does a decent range of pies’n’mash these days. Naturally Chris was already giggly on cider before he’d even touched his fake Oasis (mirage?).

The rain was starting to fall as we migrated from pub to theatre and took our seats. An older audience than I was expecting; no Harry Potter, I suppose. But we did have a great cast, led by Simon Callow as the psychiatrist Martin Dysart. The role of Alan Strang, Daniel Radcliffe’s in the West End, was taken by Alfie Allen – son of Keith, brother of Lily. I didn’t recognise any of the other actors.

Equus is about Alan Strang’s, uh, passion for horses and the circumstances that led him to blind six of them. The psychiatrist gradually draws out the story, which we see in flashback (no hand-waving diddly-doo-diddly-doos from the cast, it’s all in the dialogue). There are no Rentaghost panto horses, just men (and a woman) in brown skin-tight clothing with silver horse-heads and huge silver horseshod feet adding several inches to their height. It works astonishingly well.

The play is famous, neigh (do you see?) infamous for its nudity. It contains both flavours: Alan Strang plus Jill, a girl from the stables where he worked. In truth it does seem a little gratuitous, an early 70s anti-establishment right-on get-em-off hippy thing, but it was nonetheless not unwelcome. It certainly stopped the seemingly interminable coughing and spluttering from audience members who should have been at home with the Lemsip rather than drowning out the dialogue with their noisy phlegm.

Alfie Allen does well as Alan Strang. I was going to say that I’d like to see more of him, but there’s little else left to see, frankly. Simon Callow naturally steals the show, playing Simon Callow as usual (funny how the best thesps are like that). The actors playing Alan’s parents Frank and Dora were also excellent.

Enjoyed it tremendously.

Avaragado’s rating: four Milky bars

A few weeks ago, you may recall, Chris, Chef and I saw “TV funnyman” Richard Herring perform his stand-up routine. I neglected to mention then that I am a personal friend of Richard. I say personal friend, he’s an acquaintance really. Well, sort of acquaintance. OK, we exchanged a few words after the show (me, on spotting him scampering to the bar about a minute after leaving the stage: “That was quick!”; him: “Got to get to the bar”). Anyway, his comedy partner and officially 41st best stand-up Stewart Lee performed for one night only at The Junction on Sunday. Chris and I, minus Chef this time, went along to see him.

Pre-show we downed a swift pint at the Cambridge Blue Kingston Arms and made a speedy visit to the Golden Curry. From there it was a ten-minute adventure along mysterious back streets to C’hinton Road and the chav-haunted concrete box piazza known as the Cambridge Leisure Park. The event took place in Junction 2, AKA The Shed – a venue supposedly designed for small-scale drama and dance, AKA pretentious gurning and flapping about.

Plastic beers in hand we took our seats a few rows from the front. The support act was great but I am forbidden from describing it here by edict from Stewart Lee, and like all good citizens I always do as the 41st best stand-up comedian instructs.

As a few weeks ago, it was odd to hear one half of the double act without the other, but there was always a presence: the occasional line with a whiff of Herring. I’ve always liked the distinctive Stewart Lee style: articulate, verbose, exaggerated. Or something.

Mostly very funny, though with a weak ending I thought. (The ending would have been stronger but for the sudden distraction of what seemed to be an outrageous violation of the law: a small cloud of cigarette smoke billowing up from an audience member between us and the stage.)

Avaragado’s rating: five sardines

Yesterday Chris, Melanie, Chef, Andy, Louise and I cantered with coconut shells a-clacking to the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, for the matinee performance of Spamalot.

An opportune 3-for-2 offer meant that wine-drinking began almost as we left Cambridge; on arrival at King’s Cross we were on the second bottle. This tongue-loosener helped me heckle an out-of-towner standing on the left on an escalator, who was blissfully unaware that people have gone to the Tower for less.

Disgorged at Leicester Square blinking into a sunny spring day we found our pre-theatre pub, The Cambridge, and sat outside people-watching with a pint until the time came to saunter over the road for curtain up. Chris took a sneaky photo as we waited for the performance to start.

It’s a fantastic show. Very, very funny. Everyone in the audience was intimately familiar with the original film, of course, and all is present and correct, but there are still a few surprises (which I won’t spoil here). I’m glad to report the absence of anoraks with their weak lemon drinks joining in with the script, but certain lines, and the appearance of certain characters, did cause a round of applause. I found this amusing; it reminded me of the demented hollering of studio audiences when Fonzie gurned onto set, or the applause when a musical artiste starts banging out an old faithful.

No expense is spared in the production; it’s very twinkly indeed. The only slip-up I saw involved the gradual separation of a knight from his moustache. The cast is uniformly very good, and Simon Russell Beale made an excellent Arthur. Different from Graham Chapman in (a) height, (b) width and (c) sobriety.

Yes, you could buy coconut shell merchandise and tins of commemorative spam. No, we didn’t. However, Chef bought an “I’m not dead yet” t-shirt (not applicable to his car).

Avaragado’s rating: one bowl of assorted fruit

Post-Spamalot we boozed at Waxy O’Connors, a pub containing a tree for no adequately explained reason. And then we ate at Mela, an Indian restaurant near to the theatre, before training home.

See Chris’s photos of the day, if you haven’t already.

Back in Cambridge just before eleven, I all-too-predictably went to the Fleur and met up with Robert and Richard. There was a Shirley Bassey impersonator on stage; very poor, and inexplicably murdering Sinatra songs rather than the traditional Bassey staples. Once she’d finally warbled her last, the three of us set the world to rights until 1am before continuing up the road in the Rose for another couple of hours.

At closing time a bouncer (not Craig) took issue with Robert’s reluctance to drink up and his forthright tongue and, how can I put it, slapped his remaining half-pint (in plastic glass) from his hands to the floor via his trousers. Poor show. Robert declared that he’ll never go back there again, but he’s probably forgotten that.

Another Saturday, another West End musical in oppressive heat. This time I and my culturally sophistimacated chums went to see Avenue Q, the Tony award-winning Broadway show still technically in preview here but very polished nonetheless.

I won’t spoil it for you (Wikipedia will if you’re keen), but in brief, it’s muppets for grown-ups. Not true muppets, as those are in the loving embrace of the Muppets Holding Company, but extremely close relatives thereof.

In case you’re fretting over the mechanics of the production: the muppet operators are visible, and use the stage exactly as unmuppeted actors do. Each operator owns a couple of characters, performing all their actions and voices (there’s no attempt at ventriloquism). When two characters owned by the same operator are on stage simultaneously, another operator does the actions but the owner does the voices. It’s very well done, and you quickly focus on the characters and not the operators.

There are some human characters as supporting cast. The stand-out human is gloriously named Christmas Eve, a stereotypical OrientalAsian-American, played by the only cast member to transfer from the Broadway production.

Oh, it’s just great. Avaragado commands you to see it immediately.

Avaragado’s rating: eight fruit pastilles