ROUND THE HORNE.
London
ROUND THE HORNE REVISITED
by Brian Cooke
The Venue
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 55min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 899 3335
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 January 2004
Could this show become a cult?People of a certain age, as they say, will recall the innocent sixties, when all but the most spaced-out were sufficiently of the post-war period for suggestively dangling comic carrots to provoke outbursts of laughter. They still do, treading the bounds of the shockingly un-PC as they once did the edge of respectability.
The half-hour radio scripts for Round the Horne were beautifully-crafted, gags flowing non-stop. Brian Cooke, one of its four scriptwriters (others included Barry Took and Marty Feldman), hasn't lost his knack - a good half of the material here's new.
While Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick mugged the camp Julian and Sandy, and Betty Marsden hooted as sex-starved prudish Aussie Judy Coolibah or cooed as Dame Celia Molestrangler in Cowardly vapidities for the show's dramatic brief encounters, there like a rod so to speak at the centre was MC Horne himself.
He anchored the show in respectability, declaring with beefy bonhomie his dread of incipient innuendoes. Only Humphrey Lyttelton's Old Etonian suavity can carry off the rudest suggestion with the same innocent aplomb.
Michael Kingsbury's production, fresh from his own White Bear Theatre in Kennington, catches every nuance, Horne's stillness (he'd had a stroke in the fifties) contrasting the others' moves to and from mikes. The original performers, on the other side of the cast-list now, are sensibly shown first in silhouette the voices are the thing.
Robin Sebastian's miraculously close to Williams, with his corkscrewing features, snorting laugh and exaggerated pitching. The other two shine in quick-changing characterisations, Nigel Harrison giving Paddick a wonderful Cockney manner, Kate Brown magnificently composed as elegantly assertive rose in the thorn-bush.
And Charles Armstrong's BBC announcer, inveigled into the script as would-be vocal impersonator or foil to Williams' acting pride, retains a marvellously bland pleasantness throughout.
Central as he should be is Jonathan Rigby, catching exactly Horne's richly insinuating voice and manner. The performance is immaculate, but what makes this show isn't just re-creation; it's the surprise of how modern, in form and manner, Round the Horne was radio trembling on the edge of the Monty Python age.
Kenneth Horne: Jonathan Rigby
Douglas Smith: Charles Armstrong
Kenneth Williams: Robin Sebastian
Hugh Paddick: Nigel Harrison
Betty Marsden: Kate Brown
Sound Effects Man: Tim Molyneux
Director: Michael Kingsbury
Designer: Liz Cooke
Lighting: Tony Simpson
Sound/Music: Rod Anderson
2004-01-28 02:42:58