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Iain Lauchlan, oh yes is is, as Sarah the Cook. Pictures: Nicola Young Dick Whittington Coventry Belgrade ***** You only have to see an Iain Lauchlan pantomime once and you're hooked. Many of the Belgrade punters have been going back for years and years and years. You know that everything is going to be fantastic: the sets, the acting, the dance. And the laughter. Every year his Christmas pantomimes are very wacky indeed. They have the audience (Lauchlan points out that every audience is different) in stitches, and they will keep it up for six and a half weeks. What staggering wizardry. And they are professional up to the ears. They will keep up the pace, the ad-libs, the fun, for the lovely thing is that everything is so brilliantly couched for the audience you almost feel you're invited up on to the stage yourself. They, their joy and insuppressible glee, become part of you. One irresistible invitation. The preparation is immaculate. The ideas are a hoot. The jokes are non-stop. The costumes are hilarious. The dance is dotty. The goodies are lovable. The baddies are hissable. Everything is slick. Every twist and turn vivid and vital. The whole show is an insane jamboree, miraculously inventive, endlessly gigglesome, incredibly clever from start to finish. And evert utterance is intelligible by even the smallest child. What intelligence. What an achievement. One secret is the casting. Lauchlan selects his team, the main roles, inspiredly - some regulars, many from audition. Thus we are treated to Aonghas Ewen - who sings fabulously, moves and frolics fabulously - as the bossy deputy rat (this show is peppered with rats). He finds Lois Brook to play Dick as a perfect girl-boy, trouser-role. He has Andy Hockley - a true regular in his 19th Belgrade Panto - as the wicked, shamelessly greedy and ambitious King Rat: wonderfully hateful, booable on every entry, and for all his aspirations to rule the world, above all (hurrah!) a failure and a flop. Lauchlan's number two, for many years, has been Craig Hollingsworth, here as Idle Jack. Actually he's not idle at all. Hollingsworth is blissfully hyperactive, a master of ad-libs, a mix between saint and rogue, a genius at playing the audience, an impudent wit, a long-suffering aide, a periodic victim but an ever-loyal adjutant. The colours of both set and costumes were stunning. Just about every hue was represented - blues, reds, oranges, greens and a host more. Lauchlan's outfits (as Sarah the Cook) were utterly sensational; you could guess what was coming next - multicolour, pastel, polkadot, gloriously garish and outrageously shaped, while he inside them twizzled and twirled, swivelled and gyrated and pirouetted with - amazingly - immense grace.
Sidekick Craig Hollingsworth as Idle Jack Heaven knows how much these six or seven over the top garbs cost: hooped and bosomed and hilariously ridiculous - but for this enraptured audience surely worth every penny, all down to Costume Designer James MacIver: what sheer knack and expertise. Jack has his own attire, adapted near the end. Gabriela Harris's charming Fairy gleams in her own dinky, natty shiny clothing, and introduces each part in a fine, ringing voice. And her skill playing a really appealing double role was terrific. Less successful, for me, was Tommy, Dick's Cat. Newcomer Sam Woods is given not the most kitty-like, but a clodhopping costume of no merit (couldn't it be changed and bettered during the long run?); as a consequence his movements are - perhaps inevitably - uncatlike (until later, when at least he comes vividly alive); his role and persona are not very well defined. What was needed here was the same level of invention, diversity, feline feeling, catty irony, arguably better script, and not even the astuteness of Assistant Director Vicki Stevenson, who contributed so much to the show, managed to resolve this anomaly. Much though we are meant to loathe the rats (many of them), and of course do, we can't but be entranced by their dancing. Jenny Phillips choreographed all this, and the best bits - which means most - were slick, polished, perfected, and eye-catching. Lauchlan arrives in first gobsmacking costume - topped out like icing by a crazy vast swathe of pink hair - and he (she) launches into her first duo with Jack, who has already started his routines ("Shut yer face" - Frankie Howerd). They recruit a hapless audience member ("What's your name? It's not a hard question"), who is gamely trapped into appearing again and again throughout the show, right up to the traditional shaving cream gag. He copes really well; becomes a star, in fact. The down in the depths set for King Rat is quite astonishing. It's a pair of offset sewers, ominous, ghastly, devouring. And MacIver clads him in an equally grisly, loathsome costume, same colour as the repellent sewers - just the idea for giving us the shivers every time he appears. Andy Hockley has no difficulty with that: he is made for the part, and it for him. Sneery, awful, abysmal (and living in an abysm), he is an absolutely gruesome character. And filthy, smelly, surely. You'd like to step on him, but the snapping consequences would be too dreadful. What a bastard. Horrific. The absolute opposite, charming, honest and beguiling, is Alice, who (we can surely guess) will ultimately marry Dick; and is doubled, quick-change, by our white-pink-gold-lit Fairy, Gabriela Harris. It's important for this delicious tale that she should be enchanting: and exquisite she certainly was. What appeals is the innocence, the honesty, the absolute decency she displays. A contrast not just to ratland, but to the wild comedy around her. And Miss Harris was certainly winsome and wonderfully innocent. No wonder Lois Brook's (actually ravishing and alluring) Whittington falls for her. As impressive was Alice's father, the Alderman (nice old-fashioned, time-honoured title), Declan Wilson, a very civilised not so old cove; he exuded dignity, and amongst other things, his speaking was perfect: exemplary.
Andy Hockley as the gruesome monarch of the sewers and all that is nasty, smelly and vile (boo hiss) King Rat
The lighting (Jason Taylor) was to all intents bold, apt and original, including some perfectly aimed spots (sometimes two contrasting ones at the same time). Somehow, skillfully, quite sensitively, he did everything right. But now for Ian Westbrook's sets. The evocation of 15th-16th century London - leaning houses picked out in bright colours - was frankly brilliant. Maybe even more so, the ship on which all embark, and which amazingly - unbelievably - blithely sails off into the wings: what an achievement, a masterpiece of design; and of which by the second half, by superb change, is converted into the interior, or at least poop deck. It looks both toylike and, with its noble timbers, impressively real. A masterpiece, really; but then all the sets were so. A seascape curtain with shifting creatures - jellyfish, seahorse, a gigantic octopus - was classic genius; endessly resourceful. Hollingsworth's Idle Jack commanded the stage at every turn. A hilarious Mastermind sketch (pinched from The Two Ronnies, perhaps); a Kenneth Williams-like cackle. A sweet and welcoming way of dealing with small children lured onstage. But what a smooth, canny performer. No wonder Lauchlan has chosen him to work with over so many years. And when the Coventry audience turns up, it knows the kind of sparring they're in for. The pair were made for each other, they give as good as they get, and at every move and utterance we receive a masterclass in what just what Panto of the highest, top-flight quality should be. But of course, the laughably virtuous, naughtily resourceful heroine of this unforgettable Dick is Iain Lauchlan's laugh-a-minute Momma, Sarah the Cook. Each year, in a dfferent way, she rules the roost. I might have chosen more offbeat names than Sarah or Tommy, but that didn't matter. Plenty of fun is had with the (offstage) kitchen. Her toings and froings with Jack are a non-stop hoot. Her speaking is tittersome and snickersome. He (she) makes you chuckle and snigger and chortle. All the asides are brilliantly devised and masterfully delivered. You might expect a sneezing scene, a helpless laughter scene, a tickling scene (you virtually get that with his tweaking of Jack's unlikely outsize skirt), but there is so much else. The extraordinary thing is that, in all her sumptuous outrageous, opulent gowns and robes, frocks and togs, even when preening (which is most of the time), Sarah actually looks not just outsize and luxuriant and voluptuous but oddly rather beautiful. Stunning in fact. But all of this is exactly the joyous, scurrilous and inescapable fact about Iain Lauchlan's incessantly saucy pantomimes: there's always something unexpected just around the corner. To 04-11-25. Roderic Dunnett 22-11-24 |
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