Skip to main content

Good Grief

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh
3 stars
Death clearly becomes Penelope Keith. Onstage, at least, that is. The 
last time everyone's favourite cut-glass matriarch appeared on the 
Kings Theatre stage she played a vicar's widow in Richard Everett's 
play, Entertaining Angels. This time out, Keith plays the widow of Sam, 
a tabloid newspaper editor in Keith Waterhouse's stage version of his 
comic novel. Keith first played June in 1998, when Good Grief played 
the West End a year after the novel was published. Fourteen years on, 
and three years after his own passing, Waterhouse's play now looks at 
times like he was penning an elegy for himself.

Keith is cast wonderfully against type as June Pepper, a hard-drinking 
northern lass who we first meet at home following Sam's funeral. Having 
promised him that she'd keep a diary of her thoughts following his 
demise, June's scribblings here become upstage asides. These become a 
form of therapy for June as she navigates her way between Pauline, the 
insecure daughter of Sam and his first wife, Sam's sleazy night editor, 
Eric, and The Suit, a gentleman scrounger who June meets in the local 
pub.

Waterhouse was always a better writer than he was a dramatist, and 
Keith delivers June's monologues with a deadly dryness in Tom Littler's 
touring revival for the Theatre Royal, Bath. There are some pithy 
observations on the ageing singleton's lot and how the bereaved can 
cling to memories. Any poignancy relayed over a bundle of rediscovered 
letters, however, is over-ridden by the ending's sudden lurch into 
1970s trousers-down farce. Even with such inconsistencies, to hear 
Keith swear with such common or garden gusto was a refreshingly 
shocking treat.

The Herald, October 4th 2012

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...