Old King Cole
The spirit of Ken Campbell’s bushy eyebrows hovers over Rebecca Gatward’s rip-roaring production. Anarchic, larger-than-life, wildly animated and just a little bit spiky, the gravel-voiced comedian’s most famous features have a lot in common with his play, updated since its first outing at Stoke-on-Trent in the late Sixties.
Remember the nursery rhyme about the merry old soul calling for his pipe, his bowl and his fiddlers three? OK, you can forget that. There is a fiddler mixed up in the mayhem, but he doesn’t actually play the violin (although, like everyone else, he fiddles quite a bit).
King Cole (Malcolm James) lives in Buckingham Palace with a consort named Brenda, played by Angela Bain in a neat hat and with a handbag clamped to her arm. Remind you of anyone? These two have a sweet but daffy daughter called, appropriately, Daphne, who is to be married off to the winner of a sporting contest between a dusty Elizabethan courtier called Baron Wadd (who may be one those men in tights off-duty from the House of Lords) and an impossibly glamorous blond hero with pneumatic thighs who has leapt straight from the pages of a True Love strip, Cyril the Fiddler (James Cash).
The whole thing is stage-managed with magnificent ineptitude by the Amazing Faz (Nick Raggett) and his skinny assistant, the dopy Twoo (Ben Fox) whose floor-skimming coat contains pockets overflowing with treats delightful to a princess, such as Day-Glo lollypops and ice-cream cones. Faz has been offered a stash by the spindly Wadd (Daniel Crute) to fix the contest, but somehow, despite elaborate cheating, things go just a bit wrong. In any case Daphne (wide-eyed Leah Fletcher) has fallen for Twoo by now and the second half of the show concentrates on subverting the intended royal wedding (with the aid of a gutted washing machine and a ton weight) and getting the sweethearts together without any yucky kissing to mess up their bliss.
The initial scene-setting is a bit pedestrian: Raggett and Fox are not Laurel and Hardy, but they get into their stride pretty soon and Faz’s addiction to sausaging is a delight. Twoo repeatedly proffers, with appropriate panache, a silver case of cigar-like bangers and neatly trims the tip off each as required.
The whole thing is silly. Wonderfully silly. There are few plays which can make a five-year-old and her parents chuckle simultaneously, but this is one of them.
– Heather Neill
