Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty (Saville)
THEATRE
Desperate Dan
HILARY SPURLING
Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty (Saville) The Young Visiters (Piccadilly) Among the many pleasures of what has been. in my view, a remarkably fine winter in the theatre, few have been more spectacular than the pantomime at the Saville. Or, rather, than Danny La Rue's Queen Passionella. for which the show provides pretext and setting.
If principal boy and pantomime dame each suggest strange, titillating fancies. then Mr I.a Rue, possessing the charms of both and the drawbacks of neither, embodies something very heady indeed. It is something which one in- stantly recognises when, after many feints and false alarms, Queen Passionella makes her entrance, in a little crown and spangled lemon yellow, swaying rapidly between ranks of grovelling courtiers towards the footlights. Her presence is powerfully bewitching, and it is not hard to see why. For Passionella is a dream come true a dream of majesty and dazzling glamour, a creature of fabulous opulence, wild caprice. irresistible allure, who still shops at c and A or. falling asleep for a hundred years, drowsily tots up the number of gold tops due for delivery on the palace doorstep in the interval. It is. of course, a feminine dream, and this. I think, accounts for at least a part of Mr La Rue's weird magic.
Ravishing in tutu and tights. as bunny girl, or Tyrolean matron in dirndl skirt and apron, hunched in protest as Julie Felix. plumply pert as Lulu or slim and nubile as Sandie Shaw— condemned for good to caper, as she glumly says, 'like a bloody puppet on a string'—Mr La Rue is by no means limited to one kind or even to one period of fantasy. But his chief allegiance is to a rather older and more artful type of beauty. She wears innumerable wigs and gowns of silk or velvet, firmly moulded to breast, hip and thigh, with skirts intricately slashed or hobbled; ruffled lace, plunging décolletage, richly fur-trimmed cloaks and trains, mauve suede boots or tights and wickedly high heels. More often than not she is a luscious blonde with diamond clips and platinum curls, fluttering lashes, dewy lips and killing eyes. Beside her, the women on the stage look curiously unappealing, pallid, sadly lumpy in all the wrong places. For this is per- haps the last glimpse we shall ever see of a kind of star who has long since gone her ways —no one now, at any rate in the English theatre, can make a simple pirouette, the batting of any eyelid, the management of a train or the showing of a leg into a-matter of such audacity and such breathtaking assur- ance. And I don't believe that, in their prime, any of the great beauties of stage or screen can have been grander, more voluptuous or more radiantly lovely than Mr La Rue.
On top of which, he is a man. And this, of course, is his trump card, at least where his feminine admirers are concerned. Not that there is anything remotely salacious, perverse or even faintly coarse about Queen Passion- ella. On the contrary. Her pristine freshness is her principal charm; traditional jokes concern- ing knobbly knees and striped drawers are left to the Queen Mother, Alan Haynes, as if on purpose to heighten his partner's fastidious delicacy. But it is noticeable that the men of Passionella's household can hardly be said to be there at all. The king, her husband, having been translated by a convenient spell into a corgi. keeps to the royal kennels. Suitors, though by all accounts assiduous and abundant, remain offstage.
Passionella herself is an impeccable wife and mother, quite distraught with grief when the Princess falls victim for a second time to the loath!), Carabosse: 'I ought to be horse- • whipped_' groans the Prince who blames him- self: 'Don't talk of fun at a time like this!' hisses Passionella in a curt, reproachful aside. Indeed. his absurd, transparent candour is another of Mr La Rue's especial charms. It is immensely comforting, when the curtain rises on a ball—a fairly dismal affair with ladies of the chorus waltzing in vast, pro- truding skirts to find Mr La Rue, soignée and Sardonic. observing with a shrug: 'Welcome to Come Dancing.'
And this frankness serves to emphasise how extremely precarious is the line between sug- gestion and open statement. Pitfalls lurk, for instance, in a somewhat dubious pas de deux in which Passionella, as ballerina, hoists her male partner bodily off the ground and dangles him at arm's length. This number, inserted presumably to prove to unbelievers the strength of Mr La Rue's right arm and nifty wrist, is the only one which betrays the faintest trace of awkwardness or discomfort. It explains why, elsewhere in this production, men are so con- spicuously absent. For Mr La Rue makes no attempt to disguise his deep male voice or his more vigorous charms. His art, like that of the actresses who specialised in male imper- sonation on the Restoration stage or in the Victorian music hall, is not an art of conceal- ment. rather the opposite. And his object—in which he is mightily successful=is precisely theirs: to excite the same rapturous sensa- ' tions, the same tremors and delightful palpita- tions in the bosoms of the opposite sex.
I should add that, though the show contains various shadowy remnants of traditional panto- mime, it has no clowns, no slapstick, no ani- mals, practically no community singing, and is not only unsuitable but, to judge from the few I saw around me, deeply boring for small children. The same may, for all I know, be true of Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters, in a musical version which uncannily preserves the polished wit and unnerving penetration of the original. Jan Waters is all her author could have wished as the fair but costly Ethel, with Alfred Marks uncommonly mere as Mr Sal- teena and a marvellously manly Bernard Clark by Barry Justice. The whole most elegantly _dressed and set by Peter Rice and crammed with 'other good dodges of a rich nature'—not least among them a proposal scene which must rank among the finest ever seen on any stage.
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