In the west end of London, a huge old higgledy-piggledy house appears
to have burst through its walls and been tilted to one side by its
foundations resting somewhat creakily on a post-war bomb-site. As an
image of a dusty old England that looks fit to collapse, it couldn't be
more perfect for Graham Linehan's new stage version of classic Ealing
comedy, the Ladykillers, which tours to Edinburgh this week prior to
dates in Aberdeen and Glasgow.
Judging by its spring dates, this darkly comic yarn about a gang of
villains who move into rooms in an eccentric old lady's dilapidated
house close to the railway station in order to plan a security van
heist has more than survived the translation. Much of this is down to
Linehan's collaboration with director Sean Foley. Both, as Foley
somewhat appropriately puts it, “have previous.”
Linehan, of course, is the Dublin-born co-creator and co-writer with
Arthur Matthews of seminal clerical comedy, Father Ted. Since that
programme came to an end following the death of lead actor Dermot
Morgan in 1998, Linehan has worked on numerous TV comedy shows,
including Chris Morris' Jam, Dylan Moran vehicle, Black Books, and more
recently on The IT Crowd.
As one half of comic duo The Right Size, Foley, along with performing
partner Hamish McColl, Foley went from appearing in small shows on the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe to creating The Play What I Wrote. This
smash-hit celebration of Morecambe and Wise transferred to Broadway
along with an ever-changing roll-call of celebrity guests.
Combined, Linehan, Foley and William Rose's original story for
Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 feature film starring Alec Guinness and
Peter Sellers make for a kind of comedic supergroup.
“Our show's got a lot more jokes than in the film,” Foley points out.
“We weren't trying to be slavish and just rip off the existing work. We
wanted to use it as a springboard to both homage the original, but also
to take it elsewhere.”
For Linehan too, “The film was great, and we all knew that, but there
were enough possibilities to have fun with it, but to also stay true to
the film's original intention. I'd seen the film a few times when I was
younger, so my memories were very much down to to the essentials. I
remember my pleasure as a kid when I realised all these guys were going
to be killed, and the fact that the old lady hot away with the money.
So that's obviously all there, but I think people would've been
justified in being annoyed if we'd just repeated the film. You're not
doing anyone any favours if you just put in things which worked in the
original, but not for today.”
This goes beyond Linehan's dialogue, as the wonderfully inventive heist
scene is a testament too. But there is more to The Ladykillers than
fun. As with Richard Bean's phenomenally successful One Man, Two
Guvnors, which relocates Goldoni's eighteenth century comedy, The
Servant of Two Masters, to 1960s Brighton, Linehan and Foley have fun
with The Ladykillers' period setting. Out of this comes an extension of
Robinson's original dissection of a little Britain awash with seeming
stereotypes who represent different strata of a bunged-up post World
War Two society about to burst open.
Amidst Linehan's madcap one-liners, there are prat-falls aplenty and a
gang of villains with a full set of psychological tics that give things
an increasingly manic edge. With the robbers masquerading as a group of
musicians, but resolutely unable to play a note, the reaction to the
discordant din produced when they're forced to entertain their elderly
landlady's gathering is enthusiastically summed up when one of them
declares that 'Art is one of the primary pleasures afforded the middle
classes'. The fact that this line elicited a round of applause during
an April matinee at the Gielgud Theatre says much about the milieu the
play depicts.
This new version of The Ladykillers also marks something of a
reinvention of classic adaptations which the show's lead producers
Fiery Angel have already explored with their portmanteau production of
The 39 Steps with a cast of just three onstage. Such rendering of
familiar yarns use theatrical techniques more akin to fringe theatre,
alternative cabaret and the TV comedy shows they inspired onto a
mainstream stage. Hybrids like this are far from new, as Foley explains.
“Shakespeare based most of his plays, his comedies especially, on
already existing works,” Foley says. “But he changed them and mixed
them up so they had somewhere else to go.”
With this in mind, this year Foley has also directed a new production
of Joe Orton's final play, What the Butler Saw. Orton's subversive take
on farce came from a thorough knowledge of classical comedy, which he
then filtered through his own scurrilous 1960s sensibility. In 2013,
Foley will be directing a new version of Thomas Middleton's Jacobean
comedy, A Mad World My Masters. Foley's Royal Shakespeare Company
production will update Middleton's play to a 1950s Soho populated by
hostesses, jazz musicians and on the make racketeers.
“I think there's something about people wanting to watch good comedy
and entertainment right now,” Foley observes of the rise of post-modern
populism. “But you have to try and reinvent things. It would be
cynical to just try and tap into the nostalgia market. You have to try
and give people a genuinely new experience with material that's
familiar to them. So what we're doing with The Ladykillers, it's just a
soup, really.”
After The Ladykillers, then, could Foley see himself putting other
Ealing comedies onstage?
“Probably not,” he says, “but I'm sure someone will, as is the way of
things when something becomes successful. Right now, I'm sure there are
producers all over London trying to figure out how to do The Man in the
White Suit.”
The Ladykillers, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, November 5th-10th; His
Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, November 12th- 17th; Theatre Royal,
Glasgow, November19th-24th
The Herald, November 1st 2012
ends
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