BARNES’ STORMERS!
Forget dull monologues — these mini dramas pack a big punch
Barnes’ (originaltheatreonline.com) Verdict: Power People to the people The Year Of Magical Thinking (audible.co.uk)
Verdict: Let your eyes rest in peace All On Her Own (stream.theatre)
Verdict: Dee’s a delight but the story is slight
HE NEVER became a national treasure, but about the same time Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads were launched on TV in the 1980s, playwright Peter Barnes had his own set of one-person vignettes on telly.
Back then, they starred Jeremy Irons, Judi Dench, Alan Rickman and Antony Sher. Now they have been brilliantly revived with Matthew Kelly, Jemma Redgrave, Jon Culshaw and Adrian Scarborough.
I hesitate to call them ‘monologues’ because that has become a euphemism for ‘dull’. When handled well, however, they can be a heady cocktail of intimacy, empathy and comedy.
At any rate, Barnes had a cheeky turn of phrase and a gift for characterisation that makes them a joy to revisit — not least thanks to Philip Franks’s videos, shot at Windsor’s Theatre Royal for the unflaggingly resourceful Original Theatre Company.
In Losing Myself, Kelly plays a rueful old man chatting to a friend who lies buried in a cemetery marked for redevelopment. He laments a life during which he has lost a wife, a medical career, hope, heart and a sense of self. But if that sounds like a bleak tale, it’s not, lifted as it is by Kelly’s gentle, avuncular charm.
REDGRAVE, meanwhile, plays an exhausted care home owner who feels swamped by the tide of old folks abandoned at her end-oflife institutions; and depressed by the fact that most appear to think they don’t deserve any better.
Yet this, too, is a touching tale of a longing for love and respect.
In Billy & Me, Culshaw uses his vocal skills to play a middle-aged ventriloquist so low ‘he can’t even entertain a doubt’.
His puppet-dummies — including a barking Major, a larky Irishman, a sweet old lady and a teasing alter ego — try to lift his spirits by becoming an outlet for his torment. Once more, though; far from being depressing, it’s another fortifying and inventive turn.
My pick, though, is Adrian Scarborough, playing a royal footman in A True Born Englishman. The original starred Sher but was deemed too close to the bone in the 1980s and never broadcast.
It’s a hilariously tongue-in-cheek portrait of a ‘Keeper Of The First Door’ at Buckingham Palace. Scarborough recalls a crisis with a sweaty hand on a slippery royal door knob, and the personal injuries occasioned by 30 years of bowing and scraping.
Prices start at £10 for each 25-minute show, or £20 for the lot. Not cheap, but worth it.
■ SHOULD your eyes, like mine, ache to be set free from the jailhouse of your screens, it’s worth having a rummage among the audio plays on the Amazon app Audible (try a 30-day free trial).
I was glad this week to close my lids and listen to Vanessa Redgrave perform the adaptation of Joan Didion’s autobiography, The Year Of Magical Thinking.
Although it’s ostensibly about grieving for her husband, John gregory Dunne (who wrote the screenplay for A Star Is Born), the story’s magic lies in dodging the reality of her loss by weaving a tapestry of memory that serves to disguise her pain.
Redgrave’s quivering voice makes the tale a balm for the ears as much as the peepers.
■ I’M USUALLY delighted to see Janie Dee. But not even she can redeem Terence Rattigan’s solo show All On Her Own.
It’s a story about a widow, in 1960s Hampstead, who fears her husband has killed himself on account of her social ambitions.
Dee brings her husband’s voice to life convincingly, if not their relationship, but the story kindles little sympathy. Strictly one for the archives.