Theatre
January Sale (Vaudeville) The Cavalcaders (The Royal Court) Breaking the Bank (Lyric, Hammersmith)
Nineties Review
Sheridan Morley
Revue is what closed in the London theatre with the coming of Beyond the Fringe circa 1960: indeed it is now so dead that a whole generation of post-Fringe the- atre-goers merely takes the word as a mis- spelling for review, and assumes it has something to do with criticism or retrospec- tive reflection. But revue had a long and honourable tradition over here from the Andre Chariot shows of the early 1920s that established Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Buchanan and Beatrice Lil- lie across 30 years to the wheelchair-and- piano-stool double of Flanders and Swann.
It is that tradition, of the urbane singer- narrator and the reclusive pianist, which is revived now at the Vaudeville by Kit and the Widow in their January Sale. Kit Hes- keth-Harvey is the apparent leader of the duo, a sprightly, urbane satirist somewhere halfway from Coward to Tom Lehrer and ever-ready with such topical questions as what is white, plastic and dangerous to chil- dren (a Michael Jackson shopping bag, nat- urally).
The widow is Richard Sissons, who start- ed out a decade ago as the dumb piano- playing partner but has now, like all good stooges, decided to come out and perform centre stage while his partner bitches from the wings. Their targets range from a demented Mrs Thatcher lamenting her suc- cessor (Wad to Back the Boy'), through to the relics of her party, 'Conservatives serv- ing and unswervingly preserving, Till there's nothing worth conserving to pre- serve'. They also come up with a savage attack on Lloyd Webber musicals and a suddenly heart-stopping, heartbreaking lament for the victims of Aids Might a Torch').
Unfashionable, politically incorrect and wonderfully reactionary in most other respects, Kit and the Widow are a stylish start to 1994.
At the Royal Court, The Cavalcaders of Billy Roche's new play are a barber-shop quartet led by a fifty-something shoemaker and surrounded by adulteries and infideli- ties and the weary guilt of men whose lives have gone wrong too fast. The play flashes back to a happier and more innocent time of romantic meetings, but its conclusions are bleak enough. Where, to break up an O'Casey title, it is usually Brian Friel (of our two great contemporary Irish drama- tists) who gives us the Stars, it is Billy Roche who gives us the Plough: his plays are earthbound, rooted in his native Wex- ford soil, and apparently very autobio- graphical. Here, Roche himself appears as the pub singer he once was, and The Caval- caders is at once a vaudeville and a memory play, redolent with regret and sharply aware of the bitter contrast between the resilient chirpiness of the songs and the actual lives of their singers.
True, it takes a while for the non-Wex- ford ear to attune to the dialect here, espe cially as the cast seems to think they are playing a studio theatre rather than a main stage. But as the evening unfolds its panorama of small-town despair, travelling backwards and forwards through time to show us how wedding breakfasts soon become funeral feasts, it is clear that Roche has found a whole world in Wex- ford. These are clearly the people he grew up with, or extensions thereof, and their lives have equally clearly been suffocated by the community within which they have, often unfathomably, chosen to remain.
This is not then, despite its shoe-shop setting, a load of old cobblers: but nor is it driven by any real sense of drama. Tony Doyle and Aisling O'Sullivan are powerful in central roles, but their characters are still in search of a plot: The Cavalcaders is all memory and no play.
Empty Space is an immensely versatile touring company (one of the few left to us in fact) which specialises in a semi-journal- istic series of historical discoveries. A year ago their Curse of the Pharaoh was a tri- umphant small-scale archaeological treat about the 1920s' opening of Egyptian tombs, but in Eleanor Zeal's Breaking the Bank at the Lyric, Hammersmith they have, alas, come up against much more intractable material.
This is the story of John Law, the Scot who invented the notion of paper money and managed in the process to bankrupt the whole of Louis XV's France, but it proves curiously difficult to stage and a manic production staged like a miniature 42nd Street doesn't help.
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