ROUND THE HORNE...REVISITED 2.

London

ROUND THE HORNE REVISITED 2
by Barry Took, Marty Feldman, Brian Cooke, Johnnie Mortimer adapted by Brian Cooke

The Venue To 2 April 2005
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 50min One interval

TICKETS: 0870 899 3335
Review: Timothy Ramsden 31 January

'Radio theatre' takes on a new meaning as old scripts are dusted down and brushed up for a new lease of life.When Willy Russell's Rita famously responded to the problems of staging Peer Gynt with the practical Do it on the radio she hit on an idea that's been astonishingly successful in reverse.

Compton Mackenzie's Whisky Galore performed as in a 1940s wireless broadcast has been popular in Scottish theatres for years, while in London the White Bear's Michael Kingsbury has virtually found a second career bringing the BBC's sound studios to the stage, starting with this re-creation of the 1960s Sunday lunchtime comedy series Round the Horne'.

Successfully transferred to the West End (The Venue's just off the top of Leicester Square - and Ends, as some of these characters might say, don't come Wester than that), it enters its second year in its third version, shadowed by an alternative cast on tour.

Surviving scriptwriter Brian Cooke, who has adapted the sixties scripts, puts it down to writers who regarded their audiences as being as intelligent as themselves. If not always as aware. Even the show's producer lived under constant fear dirty jokes were being passed beneath his nose. As they were, weekly. Suspect lines were threatened with excision if they provoked a laugh (an offence in a BBC comedy?). They always did, and they never were.

Sex lay sniggering beneath much of the nonsense language, the deliberate ambiguities, the pauses for audience minds to engage gear. And particularly the homosexuality of camp couple Julian and my friend Sandy (about as far as the love that dare not speak its name could express itself in the middle England of the swinging sixties). Their various business enterprises, repeatedly encountering that rich-voiced, ever-respectable customer Mr orne, were peppered with gay slang introduced by performers Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams.

Though a reminder of how much wasn't glorious about the 1960s (a Caribbean bus conductor? a hoot) the shows had a free-wheeling anarchy and wit which keeps them alive, especially reincarnated (in front of a 1950s wireless dial with exotic sounding stations like Stuttgart and Hilversum marked out) by a cast who have their originals to the life, and to the mannerism, born.

See reviewsgate's Archive for the review of the first edition of 'Round the Horne...Revisited'.

Kenneth Horne: Jonathan Rigby
Douglas Smith: Charles Armstrong
Kenneth Williams: Robin Sebastian
Hugh Paddick: Nigel Harrison
Betty Marsden: Kate Brown
Sound Effects Person: Keith Wickham, Julia Webber

Director: Michael Kingsbury
Designer: Liz Cooke
Lighting: Tony Simpson
Sound/Music: Rod Anderson

2005-02-01 17:44:59