‘Hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure’
Sons of Town Hall The Square Tower, Old Portsmouth
George “Ulysses” Brown and Josiah “Chester” Jones first appear singing from the mezzanine balcony above the stage – it’s a smart entrance, and lovely to see an act making the most of this unique venue.
As the self-mythlogising story goes, they’re itinerant Victorian-era vagabonds, the former English, the latter American, who could have stepped out of the pages of a Dickens or Twain novel.
Their tall stories tell of how they sail from place to place on the raft they made, and their failed attempts to find gainful employment in the new world are intertwined with their music.
And according to their shaggy-dog stories they may make lousy workers, but they do have a wicked way with a song.
The pair, in reality singer-songwriters Ben Parker (from the UK) and David Berkeley (from the
US), have created their own wonderfully off-kilter world, one that’s both out of time and timeless.
While there is a (sometimes very) loosely mapped out show, the interludes don’t appear scripted as such. The two characters have a rich hinterland that allows Parker and Berkeley to play with the stories as they tell them, so while they may not take the straight line in the telling from A to Z, the detours are worth it.
And these stories can be wickedly funny – from how dejected they felt not to join Ernest Shackleton’s expedition after writing a song for him – until they heard of his fate. Or their time in a Düsseldorf sausage factory where they would cheer their fellow workers at the end of a shift with song “after several hours of working their meat”.
While these sections are often laugh-out-loud funny, they stand in sharp contrast to some of the songs.
There’s some upbeat singalong numbers, but there are others that are devastatingly emotional.
Berkeley’s slightly more gravelly tones complement Parker’s higher register – and their two voices harmonise beautifully.
They’re guaranteed to make you cry – whether it’s tears of laughter or because of the song that taps so deftly into the human condition. Hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.