Theatre
The Early Life of Archie Rice
BRIEN By ALAN Mister Venus. (Prince of Wales.) MR. FRANKIE HOWERD has the face of a rugby football which has lost its bounce. The prim mouth is beginning to gape at the corners and sprout tattered laces. The eyes are handsewn Seams bagged by deflation. The tongue squeezes out like a pink rubber air tube. Altogether he has the look of a public-bar Oscar Wilde who has just been belted up the lacing by a heavy boot off-stage. But he is not a clown. His comic persona is that of a third-rate pro- fessional entertainer only slightly more afraid of the management than he is of the audience. He is Archie Rice five minutes after wiping a ripe tomato out of his ear-hole. As soon as he appears on stage, shambling in pursuit of a wandering spotlight, you can see that he has decided that this is not his night.
He has enemies backstage who at that very moment are putting their feet up on his cheese sandwiches, drinking his milk stout with one hand and giving him the V-sign with the other. He has been sauced by the call-boy, sworn at by the stage hands, touched for thirty bob by the Croatian acrobats and somebody has stolen his raincoat. He never did think much of his patter
and as he squints through the smoke at the Easter Island faces out there he knows that the audience will think even less. Still, he is after all under cover, playing to a paying audience, and not splashing among the puddles to a gallery queue. So he begins the auction of antique jokes, sig- nalling with jaunty false-bonhomie td each in- dividual buyer—`Thank you very much, girl,' `And you, sir,' Much obliged, I'm sure, madam.' As the laughers start bidding against each other, he begins to wonder whether they really are laughing at the jokes arid he keeps glancing round to make sure the scenery isn't falling down and running his hands suspiciously over his buttons. He fumbles a line or two in the process and for- gets himself enough to rebuke the audience for thinking this is all part of the act—'Oooh, it's wicked to mock the afflicted,' he shouts with a squirm and a grimace. He attempts a song-and- dance number, murmuring 'Slow-quick-quick- slow,' and hoping it looks much better than it feels. Somewhere here he glances off-stage again and sees the manager holding his nose and pulling an invisible chain. He rears up in the middle of a particularly extravagant pirouette and his clothes go rushing on for a second without him. He unmuffles himself pettishly—TI1 have to have that cadenza again,' he says acccusingly to the conductor, patting the hair on the back of his neck. Da-da-dee-I've-forgotten-the-words-dee- dee-da-da - you've -forgotten -my-cane-how-can-1- do - the- bit-where-I-go-tip-tap-tap-bring-it-on- then-bring-it-on;' he yodels. • It is a mistak,: to complain that Frankie Howerd lacks invention and timing. He is the comedian of ineptitude. Every desperate ad-lib has been rewritten six times. Every confused stumble and jumble has been rehearsed. Perhaps not with the cast and the director, but certainly in the nervous silence of his dressing room. His entire routine depends upon being surrounded by mediocrity which is accidentally saved by his presence. And Mister Venus, by an amazing co- incidence, is the ideal show for him. The book is witless, the songs are tuneless and the dancing is derivative. Apart from one original and witty production number in an airport lounge, the whole show is a disaster, throughout which he administers ludicrously inefficient first aid to the trapped and wounded.
It is hard to believe that the producers designed such an expensive and elaborate cod on the public simply in order to demonstrate Frankie Howerd's unique comic gifts. Certainly the contrast makes him funnier than he has ever been before. But it is the only way of explaining why the writers who were able to provide ample material for him were not also able to produce one single laughable line for any other player. Mister Venus may yet prove to be the Young England of its generation—a musical so bad that it cannot be entirely accidental. If only Mr. Howerd would coach the rest of the cast to be as deliberately maladroit, it might run for ever.
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