The smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd had faded long ago for Mr Worth (Bryan Pilkington) and Mr Chancery (Matthew Parker), two jobbing actors in a panto that isn’t selling many tickets, in Luke Adamson’s Oh No It Isn’t!, writes Michael Holland.
A panto dame is in a dressing room making himself up in preparation for his first scene in Cinderella. He limbers up with stretching exercises that do nothing for the bored look hanging on his face. Another grande dame slouches in with a similar countenance full of monotony.
Getting the call for their first scene they quickly make their entrances and sing Sisters to the audience baring lots of ‘tits and teeth’.
Back in the dressing room their tired conversation verbally creates distance between them while their synched costume change shows that they have performed this panto many times before.
They complain about the stale jokes and skits and dated songs they have to sing and dance to, yet after grudgingly helping each other on with their dresses they go out with radiant smiles while singing ‘I’m Too Sexy for my Skirt’, knowing that half the crowd wouldn’t know who Right Said Fred were if they on stage themselves performing their hit song.
Between their scenes they would bicker about past grievances from working together before. They accuse each other of upstaging, missing cues, adlibbing and not having a good enough singing voice… Mr Worth was angry that Mr Chancery did not take his job seriously and was only in it to have sex with as many cast members as possible instead of having the ambition to do great work.
Oh No It Isn’t! perfectly depicts the reality of the acting game. The statistics for those actors actually in an acting job is ridiculously low, and with so many still being churned out of drama schools each year it is the older generation that has to make way for them. Luckily, Luke Adamson has written this play for older thespians and Parker and Pilkington do a marvellous job of creating that feeling of ennui that must emerge when doing the same thing over and over again, while simultaneously performing tragedy and comedy through song and dance and dialogue under the perfect direction of Kate Bannister and in Karl Swinyard’s dressing room set that these two veterans must know so well.
This is an anti-panto but with all the ingredients of a traditional panto. There was the divided auditorium singsong to see who could sing the loudest; a wordplay skit about dad’s baggy bag in Baghdad; the innuendos and faces getting cream-pied in one form or another. The gags were olden and not always golden, but that is how it was written to be.
The end deteriorates as Mr Worth has a mini-breakdown on stage and this leads us nicely to a very poignant, dramatic and theatrical final scene. It’s what he would have loved.
Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, 410 Brockley Road, London, SE4 2DH until 6th January.
Time: 7.30pm.
No performances: Sundays and Mondays, and no performances 24th – 27th Dec & 31st Dec – 2 Jan.
Tickets: £17, £15 conc., 12 +
Box office: www.brockleyjack.co.uk or 0333 666 3366 (£1.80 fee for phone bookings only)
Running time: 80 minutes, with no interval.
