After a hearty burger at the Riverside Studios buzzy restaurant, we make our way into the main studio and are greeted warmly by a professor who hands us our degree scrolls and congratulates us on our hard work – we’ve just passed our finals! As we walk across the grassy stage/quad to our seats it becomes clear that we have just arrived at our graduation ceremony – and soon the show is in full swing with a wonderfully silly “The Things That Are Done By A Don”, a flurry of caps and gowns, and camp.
What follows is a couple of hours of joy and fun, both ridiculous and irresistibly charming. The plot is absurd in the extreme: a tramp bequeaths a piano (named Minnie?!) to a couple of recent grads, Jane and Tim, for a month, whilst he takes a little holiday. It emerges that when played, Minnie, the piano, provokes uncontrollable dancing in all within hearing distance. Meanwhile, our two leads decide to get married, to assuage Jane’s mother (Jane’s degree leads not to the workplace but the altar in this pre-feminist era) and start busking to fend off pressure from Tim’s mother to find a job with one of four influential uncles. Along the way the couple pick up a bevy of colourful friends, including a sweet mute Troppo (Lee Boggess) who is devoted to Minnie and the wonderfully posh and blustering Lord Nigel (Luke Alexander) as well as a few enemies including PC Boot and a government minister who wants to seize Minnie and put a stop to the dancing. It’s worth noting this resume simplifies the story significantly; suffice to say there is a scene in a flying saucer – in fact, it’s so bonkers that we agreed that if you tried to pitch it as a storyline to a producer these days, you’d probably be dispatched to the nearest funny farm.
The play is set firmly in the 1950s and the company embraces this wholeheartedly, with the girls prettily preened and petticoated and accents all prim and proper and perfectly pitched, in the “I-say-that’s-orfully-sweet-of-you” mode.
It’s wholesome and also hilariously naughty in parts, with lines such as “I suppose people are constantly bumping in London!” and “Batter me, shatter me, break my anatomy,” illiciting titters from the more immature among us. The Carry-on campness of a clownish seduction at the beginning of Act II, where Asphynxia (Kathryn Martin), the singer in Cleopatra’s Nightclub, flounces and poses in full Egyptian garb like an over-sexed Patsy from AbFab, had us all in stitches. Similarly funny is the scene where Jane shows the feckless Nigel that “It’s Easy to Sing” when he sings after them: it perfectly highlights the kind of daftness that is particular to English humour.
However it’s the gorgeous quirkiness and attention to detail in this production, which really marks it out as something special in a world of commercial, pre-fabricated West End productions. From the scrolls handed to the audience at the start, to a baby’s leg doing high-kicks out of it’s pram in a dance section, everything is fastidiously considered. Evidence of this is also seen in the beautifully choreographed numbers such as the “Find Yourself Something to Do” breakfast scene, gloriously and thoughtfully directed by Bill Bankes-Jones and Nick Sutcliffe. It’s also worth saying that the live band are integrated perfectly into the show, interacting with the performers in a few scenes, particularly the twinkly fingered pianist Anthony Ingle.
We arrived feeling somewhat glum and chilly on a cold January day, and left feeling joyous, warm and ever so silly!