TOMMY Festival Theatre. Edinburgh Mon 16-Sat 21 May 000
STARLIGHT EXPRESS Playhouse. Edinburgh, until Sat 7 May 00.
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LAUREL AND HARDY Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Fri 23 Apr—Sat 14 May
As they sit, all in a row, snuggled behind their pints at Edinburgh‘s Blue Blazer pub, it’s pretty easy to see which is Laurel, Hardy and the director. The wee guy will be known to Scottish audiences as Barnaby Power, part of the coup that was The Wonderful World of Dissocia at last year's festival. The big fellow is Stephen McNicholl, who most recently gave an outstanding performance as Cliff in Look Back in Anger at the Lyceum. The medium-sized one, well, that‘s Tony Cownie, a man with a director's CV which allows little room for question.
Tom McGrath‘s legendary Traverse success of the 705 has since been produced many times north and south of the border, but all three look the part, as it were, and their pedigree for producing grand nights of entertainment speaks for itself. McGrath‘s play is not simple biography; it's a technical achievement of itself. ‘You see lots of people who influenced them in their lives: Hal Roach, their wives, parents, the actors play everything,‘ says Cownie. “It's a love story,‘ McNicholl adds, commenting on the real life fraternity of the two
Theatre
Stephen McNichol and Barnaby Power
comics in this legendary character study.
But what is it that makes the comic duo so endearing through the ages? Cownie maintains that there's a primality to do with childhood at the heart. ‘The reason you identify with them is they're like children; that's why we like them so much when we‘re kids. I remember being terrified that they might get caught. You identify with them as children because they behave like children. Stan cries all the time and Olly's always up to mischief whatever they do. And they always make a mess. Like kids making a cake. That's where the comedy comes from; children in men's bodies.‘
There's comedy, as well, in the modernist dilemma of dealing with mechanisms on a grand scale. In Laurel and Hardy’s days people felt at war with the inanimate, facing a large scale mechanisation in all aspects of their lives, a feeling we're familiar with now. ‘Stan can't use anything without doing it wrongly, says Power. Any mechanism is hard, like a telephone he picks up the wrong way. He can't even walk through a door without problems. There‘s this factory in one film, and it's like a gesture, saying this is about mechanisation.‘
You know the feeling? See the play: it‘s funny, warm, tragic, and very well cast. (Steve Cramer)
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