Sobering look at Carry On star’s boozy decline
Oh Hello! (Assembly Hall) Moving and meditative
DAVE Ainsworth’s Fringe hit tribute to Charles Hawtrey is being revived after more than a decade here by Jamie Rees. And a finely-tuned, sensitive performance he turns in, too, in what is a quiet, small-scale, moving and meditative look at the unhappy and troubled star behind t he public persona.
An original member of the Carry On team, the wimpish, waspish Hawtrey’s ‘Oh Hello!’ catchphrase would become one of the franchise’s trademark signatures, alongside Sid James’ laugh, Kenneth Williams’ nasal drawl and Barbara Windsor’s boobs.
Yet, like so many of the stars who appeared in the films, he had axes to grind and his crosses to bear.
Both are laid bare here as, glass in hand, Rees’s Hawtrey takes us through the highs and lows, (mostly lows), of his life over three decades from the late 60s, and a move from London to Deal in Kent, through to his death in 1988.
It’s a sobering experience to watch the decline and fall of one of the finest comic actors of his generation.
He ended his days unhappy and alone, shunned by locals who, at first, had welcomed his celebrity into their midst, but ended up regarding him as a tightwad, drunken nuisance.
But then sobriety rarely features here. A gay alcoholic, Hawtrey did not have his troubles to seek.
Chief among the topics for his vitriol here are his fights for billing, (third below James and Williams), the scant wages paid the stars, and his love/hate friendship with Williams.
Set mostly in his living room – first in the house he shared with his mother, then the Kent home he bought for his retirement – Rees’s Hawtrey regales tales of life on set and selling himself short, while all the while in self- denial about his drinking.
He stashed his booze on set in ‘lemonade’ bottles.
BUT a way from the bitching, it’s in the quieter moments you can’t help but have real sympathy f or a man cut adrift, drowning not waving, after he left the Carry Ons. ‘You can Carry On without me,’ he told them in a fit of pique. Eventually they did, and he fell into self-deluding decline.
‘I’ve worked with Will Hay. I’ve been directed by Alfred Hitchcock,’ he says defiantly, then desperately, the echoes of Norma Desmond – declaring: ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got smaller’ – all too sadly resonant of a faded star disappearing from public view.
Assembly Hall until Aug 30