I'm never quite sure if it's the plays that attract me to the Arcola in Stoke Newington, or the choice of juicy Turkish kebabs nearby. The restaurant I ate in yesterday had Thesticles on the menu, which may be a reference to a little-known play by Sophocles which Sir Peter Hall is planning to put on at the next Epidauros festival in Greece. Or it may just be a misprint. Reluctant to show my ignorance, I stuck to the kebabs.
This play by Jack Shepherd is set in the dying world of variety theatre in the late 1950s. Ageing comic Reg Henson, a working class hero notorious for his alcoholic tantrums backstage but adored by the riff-raff in the cheaper seats at the Leeds Empire, is threatened with demotion to the number two slot on the bill by the arrival of crooner Janey Shore on the train from London, fresh from what used to be called Tin Pan Alley. Reg cuts up rough and demolishes the washbasin, sinks a bottle of Johnny Walker and generally misbehaves, but in the end sobers up enough to go on stage at the end. His shadow is the diffident theatre manager Stanley Hinchcliffe, whose job it is to make sure the show goes on. There's a motley crew of acts propping up the bill -- a second-rate comic with an overbearing wife/manager, a husband and wife dance duo whose marriage is coming apart at the seams, a nubile tap-dancer who is messing around with the comic, a third-rate conjurer and a dragonish lady from the local Watch Committee worried about smut. Apart from the opening scene, the entire play is set in the number one dressing room, which removes the opportunity to show us what's actually happening on stage. All we get is a few bursts of sound over the tannoy. As a result the play never escapes from a kind of mundane realism; the contrast with John Osborne's The Entertainer is quite instructive. Osborne's play has its structural flaws, but it has two elements that this one lacks: it shows Archie Rice's off-stage relationships with his family and others, and it shows him performing in front of the audience. And it also gives us variety theatre as a metaphor for British decline in the age of Suez. In Shepherd's play variety theatre is also dying and the veteran comic Reg has a lot in common with Archie, but he doesn't represent anything much other than himself. Shepherd sees him as a symbol of authentic working class culture, about to be killed off by the commercial pressures of showbiz, but the problem is that Reg has no real relationships with anyone. The other characters float in and out of his dressing room, but none of them stay long enough to puncture his comic carapace or peel away the layers of greasepaint and reveal the man underneath. Hinchcliffe the theatre manager is a wonderful creation but he barely appears in the second act and doesn't have the chance to develop as a foil to Reg. In this production Jack Shepherd gives a nicely understated performance as Hinchcliffe; some of the other characters are acted with rather less subtlety and truth. The real joy is seeing Jim Bywater as Reg Henson, moving from chippiness to maudlin sentimentality to alcoholic meltdown and slowly back to life via a king-sized hangover. He's a bit like a smaller version of Max Wall. It's a great performance. Only When I Laugh in this production by Love And Madness Ensemble plays at the Arcola until May 2.
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