Theatre
Shakin'
Ted Whitehead
Elvis (Astoria) Our Own People (Theatre Upstairs)
It was in 1956 in Germany, where I , holding back the Red Menace and tenck the regimental latrines, that I came acrose paragraph in Reveille that brightened t dark day. Headed 'The Pelvis,' it told of young American of about my own age %Y. was inflaming the young and scandalist the elders with his sexy songs and, mo specifically, his pelvic gyrations. Back Liverpool after my release I found plenty testimony to his influence there too, in bizarre new gear the teenagers were we ing and in the slashed cinema seats. G days. And then he went into his Army vanished forever — or at least the iconoci did, as the press pictures of a hairy roc were replaced by ones of a trimmed docile serviceman. After his release issued a string of sentimental and pato° ballads and seemed to be trying to b into Mario Lanza's market. In 1961 he go up public appearances altogether, and word was that he was holed up in so mansion with a bunch of hoods, popPI pills, collecting scalps, and consuming J9 food, emerging only at intervals to make junk movie. The decade relegated hial obese oblivion, as singers with more to about sex and politics took over. Theo 1969 he suddenly appeared again in Vegas with all the old gutsy attack but ‘1,10 new and engaging style of self-mockery. The rock world could have been his in the disillusioned and compromised years of the seventies, when even the Rolling Stones were telling us that they knew it was only rock 'n'roll but they liked it. But though he was around, he never really came back. And then he died, at forty-two.
There has to be a moral in it. Rock as
escape route from the ghetto, the perils of Idolatry (for the idol), the power of comnlercial interests to assimilate and neutralise original talent? The strength and the Weakness of 'Elvis' at the Astoria is that it Offers no moral at all. With the singer still fresh in his mausoleum, it sets out quite nrtiply to celebrate his songs. And this it does with superb theatricality, cramming Over eighty of them into its two-and-a-half hours. Timothy Whitnall, who looks amazNly like Elvis, capably plays the teenage %ginner; Shakin' Stevens takes over the huddle years, and he sure can shake — what lie lacks, in sultry aggressiveness he makes psiP for in vitality and charm; and James rroby represents the middle-aged star with tleh vocal power and authority that if you close your eyes you could swear it was the "Ian himself. Jack Good's production is bril ly staged but is strictly for those who ekllioy the music; if you do, you will probably "aye a ball. And though it is never explore14Y, the show is equally never exploitative. sack with a bang to the present in Our vk'vn People, which I saw at the Half Moon "hut which is being given a run at the Theatre Pstairs for one week commencing 9th 'alluary. Drawing on the material of several kreal-life industrial disputes, David Edgar 1,;as written a fictitious account of a clash ;Letween white and Asian workers. He casts he play in the form of a D.O.E. Committee °I Inquiry, which enables him to convey a Nat wealth of detail while gradually exposing the different types of bigotry that comPlicate the case — not just race, but sex, class ,411(1 politics too. The thesis is that while the '°111ligrants were once welcomed by the esPitalists, and resented by the unions, as a kItsrce of cheap labour, their demands for 1),ar1ty with white workers have driven man"Bement and union into a racist alliance (vhich, in turn, has allowed the National
I Jent to develop its theory of conspiracy "elween business and socialism). And the
, 411/1e unholy alliance faces women, as the rle.w source of cheap labour. Given this situintervention by the Community Rela,1°ns Commission or the Equal Oppor
iNties Commission is dismissed as a futile
; liberal palliative — in fact it makes matters ‘,‘I',Ictirse for the people it is intended to help. e piece lasts about two-and-a-quarter :',0Urs, and I found the first half hard going "Is I struggled to keep up with the torrent of vic,tnil; but I was captivated by the second, „Inch uses the courtroom format brilliantly
i" generate tension while stripping charac
bare and exposing vested interests. Wal7,•;'•bonohue directs an excellent cast, in "inleh Sue Glanville, John Gillett and Indira
are quite inspired.
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