Don’t tell the mother-in-law! Les Dawson’s back — or at least his Dead Ringer is . . .
Les Dawson: Flying High (Gordon Aikman Theatre, Assembly George Square)
Verdict: Les is more ★★★★☆
What The Heart Wants (Patter Hoose, Gilded Balloon)
Verdict: Sinatra-Allen showdown ★★★☆☆
LES DAWSON died nearly 30 years ago, but Jon Culshaw of Radio 4’ s Dead Ringers has performed a miraculous resurrection of Manchester’s greatest stand-up at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The show is all the more remarkable because Dawson was the kind of oldschool 70s stand- up reviled by the comedians who form today’s Edinburgh Festival establishment. His name is almost taboo for them — but not, it seems, for Culshaw.
Here, he makes his hilarious entrance as Dawson to the triumphant sounds of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (played by a disintegrating colliery band); resplendent in a double-breasted tuxedo with flares like mainsails and a velvet bow tie — not to mention a pair of glossy black sideburns and a luscious wig, somehow combed in all directions at once. Tim Whitnall’s saucy script takes us back to Dawson’s childhood, growing up in working-class Collyhurst in a house so tiny ‘the fleas on the dog didn’t jump for fear of concussion’. We learn that as a young man he had ambitions of becoming a novelist, which he pursued in Paris, earning his keep playing piano in a knocking shop.
Rebuffed by literary editors, he was later also rejected by BBC executives for being ‘too deadpan’. It wasn’t until Hughie Green (how it all comes flooding back) featured him on Opportunity Knocks that he became a household name.
These reminiscences occur during the show which imagines Dawson writing an autobiography while on board Concorde, heading to New York. We’re treated to a welter of antique gags, including the mother-in-law numbers that were his mischievous trademark (‘I didn’t speak to her for six years . . . well, I didn’t like to interrupt’).
Dawson’s voice is immaculately rendered, with Culshaw putting the gutter into that guttural Lancashire gurgle. Podgy hands rest contentedly (fingers steepled) on his Watney’s beer-barrel belly, and his rubbery face is lit with that rueful, inscrutable smirk that was half smile, half trapped wind.
Culshaw wisely doesn’t attempt to pull his lower lip over his nose, as Les was able to do. But he does interact with other pre-recorded characters played by Dawson — including the old ladies discussing their husbands’ plumbing — while throwing in a touch of David Frost and a moment of Hughie Green.
These scenes are cut in on a giant cartoon telly fitted with a swivelling tuning switch — a monument to analogue technology, much like Dawson himself. What a joy it is to have him back. And if you can’t catch him in Edinburgh, look out for him on a UK tour this autumn (for details visit socomedy.co.uk).
WHAT The Heart Wants is another impersonation comedy in which filmmaker Woody Allen is visited by a baseball bat-wielding Frank Sinatra, the first husband of Allen’s ex-partner Mia Farrow. The crooner means to beat the hell out of Allen after hearing about his relationship with Farrow’s 21-yearold adopted daughter Soon-Yi. You’d have thought accusations of inappropriate relationships might be a poor basis for a comedy, but Bert Tyler-Moore’s play swerves all that by paying homage to one of Allen’s best known films, Play It Again, Sam (in which he’s visited by the ghost of Humphrey Bogart).
The set-up does eventually get a bi t laboured, but Simon Schatzberger has the neurotic Allen down to a nasally ‘T’, nervously adjusting his specs, stuttering like a car with damp spark plugs and gesticulating like he’s trying to activate a hands-free tap.
Richard Shelton’s Sinatra is a slightly more rounded doppelganger, in every sense; offering Raymond Chandler- ish one- liners and crooning like Ol’ Blue Eyes, too. When he launches into New York, New York, just close your eyes and you’ll find yourself on Fifth Avenue.