3rd March A silent delight


Last night TOM and I had a jolly down to the theatre in Derby to see the intrigingly titled Charlie and Stan, a play about the relationship between Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. 

Now if like me you were not aware of a relationship between Chaplin and Laurel, the premise of the show might come as a surprise but it turns out that Stan Laurel was Charlie Chaplin's understudy for two years as part of Fred Kaino's touring vaudeville troupe. 

They also travelled across to the USA together in 1910, sharing a cabin for the journey, and then toured together in the USA for two years. This trans atlantic seas crossing was the main focus of this 90 min production interspersed with several flashbacks to their lives before meeting and some flash forwards including how Laurel met his long time comedy parner Oliver 'Babe' Hardy..

With just 4 actors on stage, one of whom played the piano score that accompanied the show it was in essence watching a silent movie being played out live on stage, with no dialogue at all save for some back screen projections of words as one might expect in an actual silent movie of the era. 

And the four actors especially the two leads were fantastic, managing to capture the mannerism, nuances and little gestures that really brough Charlie and Stan to life. A mixture of farce, slapstick, pathos and some very demanding  physical theater it was an utter joy to the eyes. Especially when they dragged to unwitting audience members up on stage to be part of the proceedings for a short while.

The only disappoinment was the half empy theatre. It was a wonderful production that brought a smile to the faces of everyone who saw it. It is just such a shame that there weren't more there to actually do that 


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

6th May Olbia

Image
  A chance to stretch our legs today with our first port of call; Olbia, Sardinia. And it was a quick stretch too due to it being only a five hour stay. Up bright and early, so early in fact that the hot food at the buffet wasn't even ready to be served. Still it gave us a chance to watch the ship glide into port past a host of oyster/mussel beds, before performing a 180 degree turn to reverse into it's berth. A couple of short bus rides later and we were in downtown Olbia. But there an hour or so before anything appeared to open, the disadvantage of being early birds and something we don't seem to learn! Not that Olbia had a great deal to see or maybe if we had done the slightest bit of planning beforehand there might have benn but we didn't. It was pleasant enough but that's about it. It was pleasant enough but nothing special, indeed we were back on the ship after just a couple of hours ashore and then managed to sleep away most of th...
Read more

7th May Naples

Image
 I'm sure I've heard the phrase 'see Naples and die' suggesting that it is perhaps not the nicest location in the Mediterranean but if it's good enough for Diego Maradona fir a few years then it's good enough for me for 10 hours. Although the millions of tax free pounds he was paid might have eased his stay. By the time we got up, washed, dressed and up to The Kitchens, the rest of the ship were already there. Compared to the Marie Celeste of yesterday it was absolutely packed, presumably with people having breakfast before heading out on 8am excursions, our excursion was simply going to be the city of Naples itself as possible trips to Vesuvius, Pompei or the Amalfi coast would have been too much / tired.  So on a day when the weather initially seemed uncertain, we jumped aboard route A for the Hop on Hop off bus and headed out into the mayhem that is the Napoli traffic where it was every van, car and scooter for the selves. I think it's bes...
Read more