Laurel and Hardy

By Tom McGrath

Directed by Peter Rowe

New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich

Playing until Saturday 3 May, then at the Haymarket Theatre, Basingstoke Tuesday 6 to
Saturday 10 May and at the Royal & Derngate Theatres, Northampton Tuesday 20 to
Saturday 31 May.

Stage and screen do not necessarily make natural partners. It can be more of a
cannibalistic relationship than a cosy affinity. Many music-hall or vaudeville stars of the
early twentieth century –so much of their craft being based on visual as well as audible
gags – made the transition from stage to screen more easily than performers from the so-
called legitimate stage.

One of the most famous of these was Charles Chaplin. Another was Chaplin’s colleague
in the Fred Karno mime troupe, Stan Laurel. Only he wasn’t Stan Laurel yet but simply
Stanley Jefferson, the son of a North Country theatre owner but possessed of an instinct
for comedy and the intelligence to perfect it. Tom McGrath’s 1976 play in this new
production by the New Wolsey’s artistic director Peter Rowe makes very cleat that the
comic-sketch fall-guy is really the one who is in control.

Ben Fox plays Laurel as a loose-limbed bundle of frenetic twitches with that razor-sharp
intelligence and an almost objective self-knowledge as much on display as his physical
comedic skills. You can see the mind dancing as easily as the feet and be caught up in the
magic of it all without knowing too much about the back-story or even the film record.

Laurel’s most long-lasting partnership was, of course, with Oliver Hardy, here personified
by Christian Patterson. Hardy knew that he hadn’t the look of a leading-man – he had,
after all been a cinema owner – but he had a stock line in heavies, the villains of all those
short films churned out by the new Hollywood studios. In 1926 he was put under contract
by Hal Roach, who also signed up Laurel. A legend was in the making.

As with Fox, this is a performance where the illusion that we are watching the real people
portrayed is maintained unbroken. Both actors take on many other parts, female as well
as male. Laurel in particular had a succession of marriages which brought him little joy,
even if the first of his wives Mae Dahlberg did come up with the stage name Stan Laurel.

Richard Foxton has designed a set in the grainy greys, black and white of the early
cinema. There’s a hat-stand, a brace of property baskets and the odd table, chairs and bed
to decorate it. Not to mention a clever arrangement of theatrical-looking curtains. And
there’s also a piano with Greg Palmer, composer as well as musical director, at the
keyboard.

In the course of the play, many of the best-known sketches come to life once more,
including the paper-hanging one (familiar also to generations of pantomime-going
audiences) which ends the first act. The play’s ending is downbeat, as anything involving
characters’ deaths tends to be, but it has its own almost gentle inevitability. There was a
packed audience at the New Wolsey on Friday which was very reluctant to let these two
excellent actors leave the stage.

Anne Morley-Priestman

/ends
489 words