Dad’s Army Show

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, March 2

Now, more than 50 years after its first appearance on television in 1968, Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s Dad’s Army remains popular – and unexpectedly topical.

After all, there’s surely much satirical mileage in watching the bumblers and cynics of a fictional English seaside town attempting to protect England from a perceived European threat in 2019.

While the series about Home Guard soldiers in the Second World War may be primed for some sort of knowing reboot (and had one, in fact, with a Bill Nighy-starring film in 2016), this stage version starring David Benson and Jack Lane is one for lovers of the classic series as it was. There have been radio versions and stage versions of Dad’s Army too, and the joy of this piece is the way it brings the adapted Perry and Croft scripts for the former to the latter environment.

What this means is that Benson (most well known for his Edinburgh fringe hit Think No Evil of Us: My Life With Kenneth Williams) and Lane’s rolejuggling performances provide much of the humour. Lane plays Mainwaring, Jones, Pike and other incidental characters; Benson is Wilson, Frazer, Godfrey, Walker and a supporting cast including the Vicar, the Verger, Hodges and Mrs Fox.

“I think either of us could play any of the characters if we wanted to swap, but we like it the way it is,” says Benson. “In some of the earliest rehearsals we took turns playing each character – me as Mainwaring, Jack as Walker – but it soon became clear who was going to be who.

“The only problem is the sheer speed of changes in tone, body language and character,” says Lane, “but it’s all about breath control and vocal choreography. Once you’ve mastered that, you can happily have a conversation with yourself as two or even three characters.

“I was a huge fan of the original series,” he continues. “Listening to the cassettes of the radio series when I was eight, I would fall asleep to them, so those characters and their rhythms are burned into my memory. I wore out my VHS copies. I knew it line-for-line, so the job was half done when the opportunity of playing them came up.”

The show involves three episodes of the radio show, although they weren’t written directly by Dad’s Army’s creators. “The brilliant adaptations of the telly scripts by Harold Snoad and Michael Knowles for Radio Four sometimes left out exchanges, oneliners and even whole scenes,” says Benson. “All the highly visual elements of our chosen episodes – such as Mainwaring and Jones being swept across the countryside attached to a barrage balloon and pursued by the platoon in Jones’ van – all this can be done with words, sound effects and the audience’s vivid imagination.”

Explaining that both Snoad and Knowles have seen the show and approve, Benson sums up what he sees as the secret behind the series’ continuing appeal. “The enduring success of Dad’s Army is not only in its exciting situation of Britain facing an existential threat, in its delightful characterisation and conflicts of personality, but because, rarely among popular comedy shows of the era, it offends no one. It has been watched by families together for generations and will always evoke this feeling of comfort for those lucky enough to experience it,” he says.

Dad’s Army may have been written more than 50 years ago, but its themes still resonate today.