LAUREL & HARDY. To 30 March.
Oldham
LAUREL & HARDY
by Tom McGrath
Coliseum Theatre To 30 March 2002
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS 0161 624 2829
Review Timothy Ramsden 9 March
An auspicious start for new Coliseum director Kevin Shaw as McGrath's dramatic biopic fills the Coliseum stage.From a very theatrical limbo – Ollie emerges behind a costume basket, Stan as a silver-screen shadow – Hollywood's greatest comic double-act recall their lives, recreating several of their routines and showing a surprising on/off screen character reversal.
Ollie, on celluloid the man with ideas, comes over as the sucker, signing up to producer Hal Roach's contracts and bullied by second wife Myrtle. While Stan, in their routines too dim to understand the simplest instruction, is the real-life planner and organiser.
Lewis Phillips isn't a dead-spit for Stan but he catches the manifold facial inflexions and the rubbery movements. The result's a believable, lived-in character. From the early, gawky Glasgow tryout under his real name Stanley Jefferson, there's no doubting this Lancashire boy was born to act.
As deep southerner Hardy, Eric Potts grasps Ollie's outsize capacity to make folk laugh –unintentionally at first, as he lumbered on to the school sports field. Potts captures too the comic's ability to inject a surprising lightness of touch and voice into his act.
And, vitally, the pair re-create the performance chemistry that turned two vaudeville comedians into a successful screen double-act. It's a demanding task; what Roach saw in Laurel and Hardy – who first teamed up on screen accidentally – was the capacity to develop a slowed-down comic style contrasting the hectic action of silent cinema. Focusing on details of their reactions to each other, it stood them in good stead when sound came along.
There's a vein of melancholy too in the pair's screen personalities, however hilarious their routines. Their later careers saw them imprisoned (like the Marx brothers) in over-long feature films. McGrath is light on this later, sadder detail, but it's still caught unsentimentally in script and production.
Despite support from their indefatigable pianist, and though Phillips and Potts embody a range of the males and females who crossed the pair's path, this remains a two-hander and Celia Perkins' set cunningly fills out the Coliseum stage with a fine mess of studio bric-a-brac evoking the twosome's two-reelers. Shaw's production moves the action succinctly, without ever hurrying. It all makes for a good theatrical night out at, and behind, the movies.
Stan Laurel: Lewis Phillips
Oliver Hardy: Eric Potts
Director: Kevin Shaw
Designer: Celia Perkins
Lighting: Phil Davies
Sound: Julie Washington
Musical Director: John Morton
Choreographer: Beverley Edmonds
2002-03-10 12:03:01