On The Waterfront – Pleasance – 4 stars
Surviving Spike – Assembly Rooms – 2 stars
Britt On Britt – Assembly Rooms – 3 stars
The trouble with the spate of onstage film adaptations that has become one of the Fringe’s minor vogues over the last few years is that, while bums in seats are guaranteed by something that’s already a box-office hit, especially with a cast-full of comics thrown-in, it’s not always clear where you can take things next.
Steven Berkoff’s solution in his production of On The Waterfront, based on Elia Kazan’s 1954 film about union corruption on the New York docks, and originally drawn from a series of newspaper articles, is to pepper Bud Schulberg’s screenplay with more realistically inclined cuss-words, then to marry the film’s method acting madness to his trademark physical style. This lends a beautiful back-alley choreography to this blue-collar Greek tragedy that looks as much West Side story as anything Kazan, Schulberg or even Marlon Brando, who originally played ex boxer and gangster’s fall-gut Terry Malloy, might have conceived.
So where the slow-walking trench-coated chorale that moves into the criss-crossing white-lined catwalks that frame the action in front of a Statue of Liberty silhouette with a meat-hook replacing her torch might look hammily naff in lesser hands, Berkoff remains the most intensely dynamic exponent of breathing muscle-bound life into classically styled stage tableaux.
As Terry, Simon Merrells gives a masterclass in studied down-at-heel angst with a swagger of bravado that stops just shy of out and out Brando pastiche. John Forgeham too makes for a largr than life Johnny Friendly. Beyond this, the ensemble work, however familiar the shapes thrown, is impeccable. When Johnny’s gang double-up as Terry’s pigeons – the none stool variety – it’s one of the lighter touches on offer.
At the end, though, this is a hugely moral tale, and when Merrells’ beat-up Terry, flanked by the man of God and the girl who made him believe in himself again, struggles to stand-up with his own kind, the play’s message of how working-class codes can be corrupted and exploited by greed, is as damning now as it ever was. Even in the curtain call, unity is strength.
If Berkoff is the thinking man and woman’s celebrity draw for On The Waterfront, elsewhere there are plenty of prime time tabloid stars masquerading under the Fringe banner. Take Michael Barrymore. No, please. Because, given the choices this most restless of performers makes in terms of work, you wonder why such a talent so clearly in full possession of a rapid-fire mind either can’t or is unwilling to see the punch-line to a joke that too often ends up on him.
Last time Barrymore performed in Edinburgh he took the title role in the touring musical of Scrooge, a man seemingly loathed by the world who sees the errors of his ways and discovers his need to love and be loved. In Richard Harris’s play, Surviving Spike, Barrymore again takes the title role, as a mercurial comic genius and national institution, who, in-between bouts of depression and spells in a mental hospital, just can’t help taking things too far. Bill Kenwright, the play’s producer , is nothing if not shrewd.
Harris’s play is drawn from Spike: An Intimate Memoir, penned by Norma Farnes, the temporary secretary of Spike Milligan, the eccentric Goon whose comedy, like the best humorists, veered closer towards soul-baring performance art than workaday stand-up. Farnes expected to tend to Spike’s eccentricities for a couple of months, but ended up being his manager, agent, confidante and sparring partner for thirty-six years.
Farnes’ recollections, knitted together by Harris as a kind of snap-shot Proustian reminiscence, continues the fascination we have with dead comedians and the sad, needy and often unhinged figures behind the tellingly manic smile. As Jill Halfpenny’s handsome-looking Norma moves into and ends up running Spike’s world, it’s a fascination that’s readily understood. Milligan’s psychological make-up is complex enough to warrant such a dissection. But unless the actor attempting such portraiture is up to the task, it’s really not worth the bother. And the frustrating thing is that Barrymore almost certainly could do it if he wasn’t given such an anecdotally banal set of thumbnail sketches and nervous tics to work with. Because, without ever resorting to catch-phrase-strewn impressions, Barrymore makes a better stab at Milligan than you might think, particularly in Milligan’s later, frailer years, when Spike’s inner turmoil is at its most tangible.
In one scene, Barrymore recreates part of Milligan’s one-man stage show, a maverick piece of meta-narrative in which the line between performer and character blurs as Barrymore can’t resist working the crowd a little. And, yes, they adore him for it in return.
Britt On Britt is a similar two-way love affair in a self-reflective audience with Swedish actress, pin-up and serial dater Britt Ekland. She may have become an icon of the 1960s and 1970s jet set through her dalliances with Milligan’s equally fragile fellow Goon Peter Sellers, pantie-wearing pop fop Rod Stewart and Slim Jim from The Stray Cats, but she’s far from a natural performer. Not, frankly, that it matters in any way. She’s Britt Ekland, for God’s sake, rabbit-in-the-headlights stare, Joker’s smile and a Chihuahua called Tequila and all. She pulled pints and Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man. She had phone sex with Michael Caine in Get Carter. She has an address book that reads like the guest list for some Monte Carlo shindig attended by only the most glitzy of showbiz aristocracy.
Ekland’s opening line, in which she declares that “I have slept with everybody,” is promising stuff for the Heat-reading set, and Ekland is revealed as one of those perennially beautiful blondes who stumble into the high life by accident, with only the most determined lasting the course. Beyond her appalling taste in men – Sellers was an eccentric weirdo, Stewart couldn’t keep his (or hers) pants on - Ekland is a charmer, even if she’s under-rehearsed to the point of sounding like she’s addressing a none too bright infant.
Britt On Britt, though, is too discrete to ever really go beyond chat-show niceties. While Ms Ekland is happy to put a kilt on things via her Wicker Man bum double and Rod the mod’s laddish love of Celtic FC, where, oh where, is the gossip on Bay City Roller Les McKeown and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes? Maybe such tales are something only Tequila is party to.
ends
The Idiot Colony – Pleasance – 4 stars
I Caught Crabs In Walberswick – Pleasance – 3 stars
Charlie Victor Romeo – Pleasance – 3 stars
Plastic – Underbelly – 3 stars
Another perennial Fringe problem, particularly with younger dramatists, is how you tap into a mad-for-it world that’s already been spewed out with considerable aplomb on TV. Joel Horwood’s cheekily titled I Caught Crabs In Walberswick, produced by the Eastern Angles company, readily ‘fesses up in its own publicity material to potential comparisons with the devastatingly good Skins. Indeed, Horwood’s teen-dream rites of passage, involving a cross-class cocktail of drink, drugs, posh girls and the most messed up parents on the planet resembles something that Skins creator Brian Elsley himself might have had a crack at twenty years ago when a rookie on a Scottish arts Council trainee directors scheme.
Horwood, a Fringe veteran from his musical, Mikey The Pikey, his celebrity chef based Food and 2007’s Truckstop and Stoopid F***en Animals is a scabrously funny observer of East Anglian adolescents in all their cartoon glory. Here, unlikely lads Fitz and Wheeler dodge impending exams and sex-talk trauma while fishing for the aforementioned crabs (well, what else did you think it meant?), before falling in with Dani, a well-bred wild-child similarly on the run from a messed-up mother. Together they embark on a joyride of erotic possibility, self-knowledge and potential self-destruction that sees them leaving childhood behind in a blaze of trashed glory.
Lucy Kerbel’s riotous little production is framed by a pair of grown-up narrators who add to what amounts to a foul-mouthed youth club delight that flaunts its immaturity as well as its not so hidden depths. Performed by a fresh-faced cast with abandon, any resemblance to prime time far makes this all the more wicked for it.
The Herald, August 2008
Surviving Spike – Assembly Rooms – 2 stars
Britt On Britt – Assembly Rooms – 3 stars
The trouble with the spate of onstage film adaptations that has become one of the Fringe’s minor vogues over the last few years is that, while bums in seats are guaranteed by something that’s already a box-office hit, especially with a cast-full of comics thrown-in, it’s not always clear where you can take things next.
Steven Berkoff’s solution in his production of On The Waterfront, based on Elia Kazan’s 1954 film about union corruption on the New York docks, and originally drawn from a series of newspaper articles, is to pepper Bud Schulberg’s screenplay with more realistically inclined cuss-words, then to marry the film’s method acting madness to his trademark physical style. This lends a beautiful back-alley choreography to this blue-collar Greek tragedy that looks as much West Side story as anything Kazan, Schulberg or even Marlon Brando, who originally played ex boxer and gangster’s fall-gut Terry Malloy, might have conceived.
So where the slow-walking trench-coated chorale that moves into the criss-crossing white-lined catwalks that frame the action in front of a Statue of Liberty silhouette with a meat-hook replacing her torch might look hammily naff in lesser hands, Berkoff remains the most intensely dynamic exponent of breathing muscle-bound life into classically styled stage tableaux.
As Terry, Simon Merrells gives a masterclass in studied down-at-heel angst with a swagger of bravado that stops just shy of out and out Brando pastiche. John Forgeham too makes for a largr than life Johnny Friendly. Beyond this, the ensemble work, however familiar the shapes thrown, is impeccable. When Johnny’s gang double-up as Terry’s pigeons – the none stool variety – it’s one of the lighter touches on offer.
At the end, though, this is a hugely moral tale, and when Merrells’ beat-up Terry, flanked by the man of God and the girl who made him believe in himself again, struggles to stand-up with his own kind, the play’s message of how working-class codes can be corrupted and exploited by greed, is as damning now as it ever was. Even in the curtain call, unity is strength.
If Berkoff is the thinking man and woman’s celebrity draw for On The Waterfront, elsewhere there are plenty of prime time tabloid stars masquerading under the Fringe banner. Take Michael Barrymore. No, please. Because, given the choices this most restless of performers makes in terms of work, you wonder why such a talent so clearly in full possession of a rapid-fire mind either can’t or is unwilling to see the punch-line to a joke that too often ends up on him.
Last time Barrymore performed in Edinburgh he took the title role in the touring musical of Scrooge, a man seemingly loathed by the world who sees the errors of his ways and discovers his need to love and be loved. In Richard Harris’s play, Surviving Spike, Barrymore again takes the title role, as a mercurial comic genius and national institution, who, in-between bouts of depression and spells in a mental hospital, just can’t help taking things too far. Bill Kenwright, the play’s producer , is nothing if not shrewd.
Harris’s play is drawn from Spike: An Intimate Memoir, penned by Norma Farnes, the temporary secretary of Spike Milligan, the eccentric Goon whose comedy, like the best humorists, veered closer towards soul-baring performance art than workaday stand-up. Farnes expected to tend to Spike’s eccentricities for a couple of months, but ended up being his manager, agent, confidante and sparring partner for thirty-six years.
Farnes’ recollections, knitted together by Harris as a kind of snap-shot Proustian reminiscence, continues the fascination we have with dead comedians and the sad, needy and often unhinged figures behind the tellingly manic smile. As Jill Halfpenny’s handsome-looking Norma moves into and ends up running Spike’s world, it’s a fascination that’s readily understood. Milligan’s psychological make-up is complex enough to warrant such a dissection. But unless the actor attempting such portraiture is up to the task, it’s really not worth the bother. And the frustrating thing is that Barrymore almost certainly could do it if he wasn’t given such an anecdotally banal set of thumbnail sketches and nervous tics to work with. Because, without ever resorting to catch-phrase-strewn impressions, Barrymore makes a better stab at Milligan than you might think, particularly in Milligan’s later, frailer years, when Spike’s inner turmoil is at its most tangible.
In one scene, Barrymore recreates part of Milligan’s one-man stage show, a maverick piece of meta-narrative in which the line between performer and character blurs as Barrymore can’t resist working the crowd a little. And, yes, they adore him for it in return.
Britt On Britt is a similar two-way love affair in a self-reflective audience with Swedish actress, pin-up and serial dater Britt Ekland. She may have become an icon of the 1960s and 1970s jet set through her dalliances with Milligan’s equally fragile fellow Goon Peter Sellers, pantie-wearing pop fop Rod Stewart and Slim Jim from The Stray Cats, but she’s far from a natural performer. Not, frankly, that it matters in any way. She’s Britt Ekland, for God’s sake, rabbit-in-the-headlights stare, Joker’s smile and a Chihuahua called Tequila and all. She pulled pints and Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man. She had phone sex with Michael Caine in Get Carter. She has an address book that reads like the guest list for some Monte Carlo shindig attended by only the most glitzy of showbiz aristocracy.
Ekland’s opening line, in which she declares that “I have slept with everybody,” is promising stuff for the Heat-reading set, and Ekland is revealed as one of those perennially beautiful blondes who stumble into the high life by accident, with only the most determined lasting the course. Beyond her appalling taste in men – Sellers was an eccentric weirdo, Stewart couldn’t keep his (or hers) pants on - Ekland is a charmer, even if she’s under-rehearsed to the point of sounding like she’s addressing a none too bright infant.
Britt On Britt, though, is too discrete to ever really go beyond chat-show niceties. While Ms Ekland is happy to put a kilt on things via her Wicker Man bum double and Rod the mod’s laddish love of Celtic FC, where, oh where, is the gossip on Bay City Roller Les McKeown and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes? Maybe such tales are something only Tequila is party to.
ends
The Idiot Colony – Pleasance – 4 stars
I Caught Crabs In Walberswick – Pleasance – 3 stars
Charlie Victor Romeo – Pleasance – 3 stars
Plastic – Underbelly – 3 stars
Another perennial Fringe problem, particularly with younger dramatists, is how you tap into a mad-for-it world that’s already been spewed out with considerable aplomb on TV. Joel Horwood’s cheekily titled I Caught Crabs In Walberswick, produced by the Eastern Angles company, readily ‘fesses up in its own publicity material to potential comparisons with the devastatingly good Skins. Indeed, Horwood’s teen-dream rites of passage, involving a cross-class cocktail of drink, drugs, posh girls and the most messed up parents on the planet resembles something that Skins creator Brian Elsley himself might have had a crack at twenty years ago when a rookie on a Scottish arts Council trainee directors scheme.
Horwood, a Fringe veteran from his musical, Mikey The Pikey, his celebrity chef based Food and 2007’s Truckstop and Stoopid F***en Animals is a scabrously funny observer of East Anglian adolescents in all their cartoon glory. Here, unlikely lads Fitz and Wheeler dodge impending exams and sex-talk trauma while fishing for the aforementioned crabs (well, what else did you think it meant?), before falling in with Dani, a well-bred wild-child similarly on the run from a messed-up mother. Together they embark on a joyride of erotic possibility, self-knowledge and potential self-destruction that sees them leaving childhood behind in a blaze of trashed glory.
Lucy Kerbel’s riotous little production is framed by a pair of grown-up narrators who add to what amounts to a foul-mouthed youth club delight that flaunts its immaturity as well as its not so hidden depths. Performed by a fresh-faced cast with abandon, any resemblance to prime time far makes this all the more wicked for it.
The Herald, August 2008
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