Virtual variety… Sunday Night at the Lockdown Palladium

Inspired by The Spirit of Brucie and The Tarby of Palladium's Past, a group of intrepid performers have joined forces to provide us with Lockdown laughter and self-isolated smiles. Using the wonders of modern invention coupled with actual magic (and let no one tell me otherwise!) these intrepid internet entertainers have been illuminating our living rooms over the past six weeks with a mix of comedy, songs, prestidigitation, performance and the ever-ready ukulele of Mr Chris Larner.

This week was the first we’d watched and it felt like a mini-holiday for the locked-down soul; a well-oiled machine witnessed by an increasingly well-oiled reviewer and people from all round the Globe; Los Angeles, Barcelona, Canada, Ireland and wherever it is that Mr Larner lives!

Jeremy Stockwell

Our compere was the esteemed philosophical entertainer Mr Jeremy Stockwell, who, splendidly attired for the occasion in velvet jacket, bow tie and fedora, gave a warm welcome to the virtual VIPs and announced his cast of all the talents! Did I mention how well-oiled things are? Very. That’s what they are!

First up was the One-Woman Company known to the world as Kate Perry (no, not that one) who I last saw in the mind-boggling Very Perry Show. This time she had brought just one of her many inhabiting characters, in this case Bridgit, a six-year old who asks too many questions and gets all the wrong answers. Katy disappears so much into her comedy characters that all that remains is the enthusiastic child looking forward to “jumpy castles”! She’s a marvel and we tapped out our vigorous applause on the chat stream to the right of stage.

Kate Perry

Tonight if there was not just magic in the air then it was certainly on the cards and in the hands of Hugh Levinson who performed a series of seemingly impossible shuffles in front of our very eyes: we were lost in legerdemain! How he does it I don’t know and as member of the Magic Circle he will never tell but we were lost in consideration of the seeming impossible: that’s prestige!

Hugh Levinson

This was followed by the verbally dexterous and emotionally nuanced actor, Robert Mountford a man who has trod the boards of the RSC, NT and BBC and who simply took our breath away with a reading of feeling and intensity. Remaining in character throughout he feigned disappointment over the fiscal reward offered by this Palladium, knowing full well that we expected that he’d be off to stay at Mark Rylance’s pied a terre to catch up on who wrote what, way back when.

Robert Mountford

Some men are born great and others have ukuleles thrown upon them. So, it was with Chris Larner who literally sang the greens with a song about the Onion at the End which was both a moving social commentary and as well as a meditation on the sadness of vegetables.

Finally, it was time for a tutu and a performance infused with such cultural depth the stage at Covent Garden would struggle to support it.  This was the legendary prima ballerina Madam Galina - Iestyn Edwards who entertained us thoroughly spinning athletically from her kitchen and then telling us of time spent trying to fit in with marines in tanks in Iraq or, fitting into tanks with said soldiers? It was fraught and when Galina lapsed into Iestyn a wonderful baritone was revealed!

Madam Galina

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***** It was lovely to see professional performers again and this was a funny and intimate way of seeing these top-notch artistes!! There are two more episodes to go and I would urge you all to join in.

Set your Zooms for the heart of the fun!

Next Sunday, 7.30, info and invite from Jeremy Stockwell on Twitter.

There’s also a Go Fund Me page to help cover costs and help support these guys when they’re between physical gigs. It’s the least we can do to thank them for re-opening the door on to a world we used to almost take for granted.

Support the arts and stay at home (even you Dom…)!

Chris Larner and his instrument.

Love, light and peace… A Sockful of Custard, Pleasance Theatre

Spike Milligan single-mindedly liberated our funny bones for a half century or more, he was the missing link between the Crazy Gang and Beyond the Fringe, a soldier blown up so high in the Second World War that he said he never really came down. 

Spike defined a comic sensibility that was as rock ‘n roll as Elvis or as be-bop as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.Why did The Beatles work with George Martin? Well, part of it was down to his having produced records for The Goons and for the lads as so many others from post-War to baby boom. His was a comedy that liberated itself from formula as surely as be-bop and rock shook free from big bands and manufactured pop. It was a very democratic mind-set, anyone could do it, well, anyone if they were funny enough and, in the case of this Lewisham lad, capable of genius-level silly.

Take Spike Milligan out of British comedy and you end up with less Peter Sellers, an unbearably smug Pete and Dud, Monty Python with no dead parrot and Ricky Gervais either still working selling paper or, at best, flogging minor New Romantic hits on the heritage circuit, bottom of the bill below Haircut 100. Spike’s was a major discontinuity in comic style and, together with other equally talented but perhaps not quite so inventive, he helped change the way we laughed for ever.

In the year of his hundredth birthday, Chris Larner and Jeremy Stockwell put their heads very close together, but not so close as to entangle their beards, and devised a cunning play of some 4.5 metres in length to answer the question of the custard, the sock and much-many more.

A Sockful of Custard manages to convey the essence of Spike without the restrictions of a straightforward narrative; it’s controlled playfulness masking the joyously hard graft of its component players.

Jeremy Stockwell

Jeremy Stockwell plays Spike Milligan and, as with his stint as Ken Campbell, shows what an excellent mimic he is… Spike is so specific that you just have to get him right and, opening the show shrouded in a sheet, Stockwell bravely takes on two of Spike’s iconic voices from The Goons. He nails it and the laughter starts to flow down from the cheap seats in the Pleasance’s Stage Space only to be reflected back Spike-style – by the two performers whose improvisations are so adept and sincere.

Interrupting our dreamy beginning Chris Larner, playing himself or someone slightly taller, strides on stage to direct proceedings by laying out cards which will form the basis of the narrative. There are 4.5 metres of instructions and Jeremy wonders if that’s just too long… It’s the two working out their structure and making a feature of the sheer difficulty in conveying Milligan.

They move from themselves to their characters with masterful ease and always direct to audience. That fourth wall is well and truly trampled especially as a glamorous redhead, let’s call her Catherine, is pulled on stage to help fold Spike’s sheet: it’s all part of the warm-hearted chaos Spike revelled in. 

And my better half’s smile as she tried to grab that sheet was so joyously in the moment, exactly what the veteran of 1940-45 would have wanted.

Spike and his Mum!

There was no containing Spike and after what he had seen, he was clearly convinced that laughter was the only way forward. I hadn’t been aware that he’d performed in Oblomov, at the Lyric Theatre and that his improvisations had created a record-breaking phenomenon.

As Spike plays the title character resolved to spend his days in bed, Chris Larner switches to the hapless thesp designated to play alongside him. He’s an insecure pro and looks out to his imaginary director repeating “is he…, is he…, is he…?” over an over with subtle intonations as he tries to second guess what the man in charge is trying to get him to ask and act. We’ve all done it but not perhaps Mr Milligan who grew bored of the script pretty quickly and proceeded to improvise the play to over four year’s of sell-out success, only stopping it when he’d just had enough.

The magnificent Joan Greenwood starred in the play and was initially very concerned but the mood shifted with her husband Andre Morrell declaring 'the man is a genius. He must be a genius—it's the only word for him. He's impossible—but he's a genius!'

That last sentence may appear to sum Spike up and Stockwell and Larner’s play is so disciplined in its in-discipline  - or vice-versa – that it conveys the unpredictability and raw unevenness of the man’s comedy and it is genuinely thrilling to watch.

Stockwell and Larner

Both recount their meetings with Spike and the mark he left; he respected his audience and was committed to kindness. He wished for “love, light and peace …” an echo of his early years in India and the post-war hopes for a continually-improved World. Now, as much as ever, we need to believe  in the prospect of happiness.

So don’t be daft, go and see these two marvellous men and their tribute to Mr Milligan; if you don’t you’ll never find out about the custard and the socks. And you’ll never get to feel that spirit in the moment.

A Sockful of Custard plays on at the Pleasance Theatre until May 26th and then transfers up to Edinburgh Fringe 2018 from 1st to 17th August at the Pleasance Dome.

Tickets available at the box office or online. The Pleasance is an excellent venue too – three stages and lots of bars!

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***** Funny, warm and thoroughly engaging. These two work their socks off and Spike is back in the room and he hasn't left me yet...

Seeker after truth... Ken, The Bunker Theatre

The bunker was laid out like a post-trippy nightclub, with Persian carpets, tables and chairs all mildly shrouded by the smell of joss sticks as Donna Summer and Spaced played us in: this was the mid-seventies between counter-culture and punk. At around that time as a 14-year old I was buying LPs in Liverpool’s Probe Records and used to be fascinated by ads for The Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool and a mysterious play called Illuminatus! I still have the flyers in a box complete with programmes for the Playhouse and Everyman, my Eric’s membership cards, old NMEs, Zigzags (a punk fanzine) and a collection of the mind-expanding Brainstorm Comix!

Forty years on and finally I get to find out more about the man behind this arcane theatre, Ken Campbell, a radical presence who influenced not just a generation of off-beat actors such as Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent and Sylvester McCoy but also the Liverpool scene in general including Bill Drummond – member of the seminal Big in Japan (a scouse super-group – look ‘em up, la!), manager of the Teardrops and Bunnymen and from there to the KLF. Campbell was an instinctive iconoclast with an energy that brought out the best from some and drove many others away.

For playwright Terry Johnson he was “…my friend, champion and occasional nemesis…” and the man who placed his finger directly on his sternum and told him that he needed to turn his “switch” on! It was a moment of intense personal connection and one that Johnson still cherishes; it helped drive him on to success as a director and innovative writer himself – I’d seen a revival of his Insignificance only a few months back and its star, his daughter, was in attendance tonight.

Terry Johnson

Johnson wrote and acts in this play and it is as disarmingly personal portrait of Ken that shows the good and bad of their relationship. Lisa Spirling directs with real style and has Ken (played by another former collaborator, Jeremy Stockwell) positioned in the audience ready to spring up when we least expected and from there on to break the fourth wall into so many pieces.

It’s a bold production that makes the most of the intimate energy this direction generates. Johnson’s words flow so beautifully well on occasion but they’re also from the heart and it is hard to imagine that they are all of them so easily said. But, his switch is “on” and he is infused with the spirit of his friend, emboldened into telling us all of Campbell’s call to just do it!

The play starts when Terry met Ken and ended up being cast in one of his plays, this time the sprawling 24-hour The Warp based on the life of Neil Oram. After Campbell had decided Oram’s original play was rubbish, he told him he wanted to “write him” and, together (maybe) they produced a script 14 inches deep that was to be performed in just six days in Edinburgh at the run-down Regal Theatre which the crew also needed to renovate. The result still holds the record for the longest play ever performed and being such a marathon, once required moving cast and audience to a tennis court to keep everyone awake.

Campbell was famous for the greeting “good evening seekers!” and was always on a journey to find new experience and to challenge those daydreaming through life. He was surrounded by a gang of talented eccentrics, John Joyce, a woman called Mia who Johnson considered the most beautiful he has ever seen (even as he doubts her existence as a single entity…), Daisy (his daughter with actress Prunella Gee, who is now also a playwright), not to mention Hoskins, Conti, Lord James Broadbent and Chris Langham.

Terry Johnson and Jeremy Stockwell

Ken was full on and sometimes would look straight in you challenging any wayward complacency or phony thoughts. He was also a one for grand-scale pranks and once re-titled the RSC the Royal Dickens Company on the grounds that they did more 19^th than 16^th Century work. He contacted the actors and issued press releases succeeding in convincing enough people that Trevor Nunn had to come out and deny that it was happening.

It’s an intensely personal exercise for Johnson and a brave one as well he’s acting himself through some of the most important moments of his life and the barrier between performance Terry and actual Terry must be wafer thin. But you know that Ken, if he is anywhere else, and who knows, maybe the Illuminati spirited him away…, would nod in approval before launching off on yet another scheme.

Jeremy Stockwell is so energetically convincing as Ken that the great man might as well be in the room. It’s good that the role is in the hands of another friend and he does his old pal full justice with outrageous eyebrows, eyes on full twinkle and a cackle that is straight from deepest, darkest Campbell.

All photographs courtesy of Robert Day

Ken is life-affirming, and because it plays around us, the message also infuses us as watchers… watchers can only do one thing and, you just know, we have to start being seekers!

Ken runs at The Bunker Theatre until 24^th February and if you don’t go you’ll simply never know how to turn yourself on!

Tickets and further details from the website.

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***** It has to be for Johnson’s bravery and for Ken the Seeker.