Theatre reviews: Laurel & Hardy | The Body Electrician
Laurel and Hardy, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh *****
The Body Electrician, Oran Mor, Glasgow **
Laurel and Hardy is set in a kind of limbo somewhere after death, where Stan and Ollie – perhaps the greatest comedy duo of all time – are able to come together, and reflect on the whole story of their intertwined lives. Neil Murray’s set, in soft grey, features a couple of huge theatrical prop baskets, a piano (played on this occasion by the magnificent Jon Beales), and a backdrop that hints, perhaps, at a road through a pine forest; and in this space, actors Steven McNicoll and Barnaby Power set about realising the dream that playwright Tom McGrath once said he had, when he began to write the play – the dream of seeing Laurel and Hardy come alive again on stage, revisiting some of their most famous and priceless comic routines, and telling their own story, from start to finish.
There’s much more to McGrath’s beautiful 1976 play, though, than simple nostalgia for the presence of a comic double-act whose work helped define the world of the 1920s and 30s for a global audience. In just over two hours, this Laurel And Hardy at the Lyceum offers both a history of the partnership, and a superb real-time tribute to the immaculate, timeless detail of the comedy that made Stan and Ollie famous, expressed through dialogue, song, and those world-famous moments of slapstick. Beyond that, though, there is also profound layer of poetic meditation on the nature of comedy, and on its relationship with death – on the timelessness of the characters great comedians create, and the struggle to maintain those characters in the face of ageing and mortality.
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Hide AdIn Tony Cownie’s pitch-perfect revival of his own 2005 Lyceum production, featuring the same cast, McNicoll and Power encompass all of this and more, bringing an extraordinary combination of supreme craftsmanship and profound emotional understanding to every detail of the play. And when they finally leave the stage – with a parting chorus of their greatest hit, The Blue Ridge Mountains Of Virginia – we find ourselves both heartbroken at the transience of human lives, and delighted by the indestructible quality of what great artists can create; all captured in what is not only the finest play ever written about Laurel And Hardy, but also, perhaps, one of the greatest ever written about comedy itself.
The Glasgow-based actor, composer, singer and songwriter Patricia Panther knows a thing or two about performance herself, as a star of recent music-based shows including Glasgow Girls, Orphans, and Lament For Sheku Bayoh; and there is a glorious moment, in her Play, Pie And Pint debut play, The Body Electrician, when she lifts up her voice and sings a song about the energy that pulses through our bodies, and how we should learn to liberate and celebrate it.
Panther is also, though, a qualified Shiatsu practitioner; and for most of its length, The Body Electrician seems something like a lecture on the twin energy-based alternative therapies of acupuncture and Shiatsu, only lightly framed as a drama about a dystopian post-NHS future in which therapies that actually cure people are suppressed, because they hardly contribute to the profits of huge health care corporations.
Perhaps because of that twin focus, Panther’s Play – directed here by Joe Douglas – never quite comes together to create a gripping narrative; and a couple of uncharacteristically hesitant performances from Panther herself as an enthusiastic lab technician working on body energy, and Cara Kelly as her professorial boss, do little to drive the story along, to its slightly unconvincing happy ending.
Laurel And Hardy, Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 25 June; The Body Electrician, Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 11 June.