LAUREL AND HARDY. To 11 August.

Newcastle-under-Lyme

LAUREL AND HARDY
by Tom McGrath

New Vic Theatre To 11 August 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 11 August 2.30pm no performance 1, 6 August
Audio-described 8 August
Captioned 7 August
Post-show discussion 7 August
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS: 01782 717962
www.newvictheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 July

Mortality of an immortal duo brought to life.
Buster Keaton placed Laurel above Chaplin and Keaton himself. But Stan Laurel, as Tom McGrath’s fine 1976 play shows, would have been comparatively little if he hadn’t been teamed up by America’s studios with big Babe Hardy.

Hardy’s southern gentleman persona matched his sense of dignity while his deliberate manner contrasted diminutive Lancashire-born Stanley Jefferson’s impulsive movements and sense of perpetual perplexity. McGrath shows the performance personae contrasting reality. On film Stan can’t follow a simple instruction. In life, it’s Ollie who can’t stick to the script and refuse to sign a new contract without Stan present.

Stan searched for new freedom. Ollie, with some justification, saw producer Hal Roach as providing artistic security. Where both boys fell down was with women; serial failed-marriages trailed behind Stan, though he owed his screen name to his formidable first partner (a career albatross had the studio not packed her back to Australia). Ollie had fewer but they all hurt.

McGrath seamlessly relates their lives, seen in retrospect from an undefined next world, with routines from the films. At times in the New Vic there’s a tension between cinema’s 2D form and theatre-in-the-round but Lis Evans’ design helpfully scatters the many objects from which they’ll shape their lives (including a tyre standing-in for the pies which made Hardy the man he was) in a circle round the stage.

Paul Warwick’s production encourages a generous slice of audience involvement, a metaphor for the affection of cinemagoers, but it’s overused (there was a delicious moment as Stephen Harper’s Stan fled scared into the audience away from Mike Goodenough taking reprisals for an uninvited comment). There’s occasional anachronism in added lines and in lighting.

Goodenough’s Ollie has the right gestures and almost the right speaking voice, though his singing’s weak. Harper has Stan’s amazing loose-limbedness and voice right, and doesn’t overuse the hair-scratching. Though the audience loved it, the drama loses some coherence in the fun of so much ‘doing Stan and Ollie’. Still, helped by Julian Littman’s onstage music-man of bangs, crashes and signature tunes, this is quite a fine mess to get yourself into.

Ollie: Mike Goodenough
Stan: Stephen Harper
Band: Julian Littman

Director: Paul Warwick
Designer: Lis Evans
Lighting: Daniella Beattie
Sound: James Earls-Davis
Choreographer: Beverley Edmunds
Movement: John Wright
Voice/Dialect coach: Caroline Hetherington
Assistant choreographer: Daniel Keen

2007-07-29 13:03:42