THE OBITUARY SHOW. To 23 July.
London
THE OBITUARY SHOW (PEOPLE SHOW 114)
by The People Show
Bush Theatre To 23 July 2005
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7610 4224
www.bushtheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 July
A People Show that's truly a life-and-death matter: not to be missed.Newspaper appraisals of deceased jazz stars line the walls. With grim journalistic humour a Dead By Christmas' Tote's chalked on a board, offering odds on cessation of life among the stars. In this evocation of old Fleet Street's news-world an obituary writer flirts with female colleagues, the more experienced ever-ready with a witty obit-headline brushing him off, the ingénue secretary impressed by the great man at the typewriter.
This being The People Show, there's more to it than that. 4 decades after their London bookshop-basement debut, they retain the mix of intensity and casualness that provides tension between the dramatic and the comic. Mark Long's caretaker keeps appearing with overlong-handled implements; is he punning on his own handle, making a point about the disproportion of life and death close together, or merely indulging a running visual gag? Significance and casualness co-exist.
There are new People around, attaching musical strings to the old stagers' brass while the regulars run their familiar routines. Long offers a couple of verbal riffs, George Khan eventually gets to show his sax-appeal. And Chahine Yavroyan, back from the day job as a lighting designer, provides his usual stubbly silence, interspersed with low-key moments at the piano.
Which provide the plot if it's right to use that word for a People Show with its slow sashays between events, the dropping-in of apparently casual references which gain significance later (actually, yes, that is a plot). Long's caretaker challenges the obituary writer to do a full-page life of an anonymous piano-player known only for composing that famous tune no-one can name.
Somehow things change; the obit-crew are aboard a ship that opens up to reveal a coffin-hull complete with (living, naturally) body. Then everyone's become musicians. By the end the page gets written, typed onto a blank music score that one wall's now become. Nightly, audiences may laugh or hold their breath as Yavroyan's pianist is described in detail by people looking at, yet not seeing, him: at once dead and alive. The reaction's up to the people who're there; which is what The People Show is all about.
People:
Gareth Brierley, Sadie Cook, Fiona Creese, Julia Douglas, Amanda Hadingue, George Khan, Rob Kennedy, Mark Long, Richard Rudnicki, Jodie Stevens, Jessica Worrall, Chahine Yavroyan
2005-07-14 17:44:45