CLEO, CAMPING, EMMANUELLE AND DICK. To 14 October.

Bolton

CLEO, CAMPING, EMMANUELLE AND DICK
by Terry Johnson

Octagon Theatre To 14 October 2006
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 4, 7, 11 Oct 2pm
Audio0described 11 Oct 7.30pm
BSL Signed 12 Oct
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 01204 520661
www.octagonbolton.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 September

Comedy's dark edge, but low on the recognition factor..
Terry Johnson's play ranges from Carry on Cleo's1964 to 1978 when Carry on Emmanuelle was released (Dick had come 4 years earlier but Johnson's reordering makes a better title and more convincingly suggests the decline in the series of Carry On film comedies that had illuminated, or infested according to taste, British cinema screens for 20 years from 1958.

Set in Sid James' initially gleaming trailer dressing-room (superior to the conditions the cast were generally given), Johnson moves from comedy to despondency as people grow older, feel nostalgic and finding time passing them by. Sid James, fond of women whisky and gambling, trades insults with camp intellectual-sounding Kenneth Williams. Onscreen fascination with body parts (what the wittier Monty Python team would christen "naughty bits") is increasingly reflected in worries about aging anal passages.

Sid's trailer becomes stained and dilapidated. His screen lustings for glamorous young women are echoed in lunges at a starlet and his dresser and an unlilkely affair with Barbara Windsor, 24 years younger, glamour star of the series and the most level-headed person on the set.

Paul Hunter directed a vivacious physical production of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Octagon last spring. But what worked with Fo is inimicable to Johnson's tightly-written script. The device of a hand-held window-frame to suggest people looking out of the cut-away caravan soon becomes tiresome, and the heavy sent by Barbara's gangland husband has his nose flattened by a band, an obtrusive prop caricature restricting the actor's independence.

The way this Eddie steps up to the caravan rather than using the door, then stands amazed at his break with illusion, neatly suggests his mix of force with the admiration for Sid the criminal world seems to have had. But the play is seriously underminded by the ending, a happy-after-all fancy that undermines Johnson's pungency.

There's little point reviving a play with 3 leading characters whose very individual styles remain widely-known from film and TV re-runs, then casting actors who don't strongly suggest the appearance and capture the originals' voices. Sophie Abelson's Barbara is the only one to come near doing this. C P Hallam finds Kenneth Williams' vocal pirouettes at moments and sometimes suggests the facial whirls Williams so readily created. Clive Mendus handles Sid's mix of breeziness and despair well but without reference to James's cheeky, self-justifying manner.

It's a strange approach, leaving this production never quite coming to terms with its script. And Hunter, usually so inventive visually, fudges the farcical climax engineered by Williams knocking the trailer's support away. Altogether, something of a strange carry-on.

Barbara: Sophie Abelson
Imogen: Rachel Donovan
Kenneth: C P Hallam
Sally: Catherine Kinsella
Sid: Clive Mendus
Eddie: Ged Simmons

Director: Paul Hunter
Designer: Atlanta Duffy
Lighting: Jason Osterman
Sound: Andy Smith
Dialect coach: Terry Besson

2006-09-26 16:41:32