REVIEW: Turn Back The Clock, St James Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Turn Back The Clock - Songs and Monologues

St James Studio

9 June 2015

4 Stars

‘One of those wonderful British battleaxe women who know how to bake cakes and repel intruders with the power of pronunciation’  (James Phillips, ‘Carousel’ in City Stories)

This line from one of last week’s excellent short plays at the St James Studio slipped back into my mind as I returned to the same venue to see Cheryl Knight deliver her sequence of Joyce Grenfell’s monologues and songs. As she firmly secured a hat like a large pink blancmange, and launched into that famous sly, vaguely suggestive satire on the daffy thriftiness of the WI, ‘Useful and Acceptable Gifts’, I wondered how well Grenfell’s humour would still stand up, or whether she would simply come over now as undifferentiated from the sprightly battleaxes she so often depicted.

Grenfell was at her peak in the immediate post-war years, an era that sometimes seems more distant from our own, at least in its humour, than many earlier decades in the twentieth century. Would the chirpy optimism in the face of the facts, the stoicism and resistance of emotional frankness, the embrace of social hierarchy as a given, and the knowing innuendo, both prurient and prudish, that then passed for sexual humour make all these monologues seem irretrievably dated?

I am glad to say that these worries were swept aside by the depth and sometimes desperate poignancy that Cheryl Knight found in this material, and by the accomplished musicianship that she and her pianist, Paul Knight brought to the bitter-sweet song texts set originally by Richard Addinsell and Bill Blezard.

Born into privilege, as the niece of Nancy Astor, and often to be found at Cliveden in her early years, Grenfell came to prominence as a character actress, and as a cabaret artist whose link-material gradually grew to become more weighty and elaborate than her songs. She had more than a modicum of disappointment and sadness in her own life and it is this, together with her acute social observation of the finely judged obliquities of English mores that confer enduring value on her work.

On the face of it, the relish in language and its expressive possibilities as irony seems to place her alongside Noel Coward. But if he is Henry James then she is more Edith Wharton: she ultimately has more heart than feisty and brittle sophistication, and it is a heart that reaches out to embrace the sad, wan, wasted lives of suburban women with hopes that died, but who still had to carry on. Here the music scores too: on their own the bitter-sweet harmonically conventional but melodious musings of Addinsell might seem twee; but against the backcloth of each of these little scenes they provide an underscore of pathos and a lament for the loss of possibility that is genuinely touching.

There is a sceptical question of another kind that needs to be addressed. It is not so long ago since Maureen Lipman’s triumphant success with Re:Joyce. Can a revival of these materials be justified so soon in the hands of another? Again, I am happy to say that Knight dispelled these worries early on. She is a very different kind of performer from Lipman, and there is sufficient room for both of them.

In the selection of the sketches (which tend to the downbeat) and in what is often a gentle and understated performance Knight puts distance between herself and the bravura Lipman. With Knight a lot is done by shifts of vocal inflection, or simple, symbolic stage movements on the small stage of the St James Studio. Also she gives the evening a plausible, economical biographical spine by interspersing the items with readings from Grenfell’s letters both to her mother and to her best friend, Virginia Graham. Much of this material is only recently available and published.

Paul Knight’s accompaniments and underscoring are crisp and deft; subordinate and discreet most of the time, but with flourishes where the dramatic need requires. Between the two of them they remind us that Grenfell was above all a live performer, who often improvised material extensively from basic core material. If her work is to survive it belongs on the stage, re-introduced by fresh interpreters to successive new generations of viewers and listeners.

So what of the sketches themselves? The old favourites such as ‘Ordinary Morning’ do not disappoint and serve to remind you of how skilful Grenfell was in getting the audience to do a lot of the work in filling in the imaginative gaps. Knight’s performance of ‘Lumpy Latimer’ captures all the hideous social embarrassment of the school reunion while also registering the undertow of disappointed expectations repackaged as middle-aged conventional success. Yet there are three little scenes, not so well known, that stand out from the rest in their depth of characterization, fully conveyed here by Knight.

In ‘First Flight’ a woman travelling to the US who has never flown before moves from chatty inconsequential nerves to deeper anxiety over her daughter’s mixed race marriage and how she desperately wants to find the right way of offering support. In the character’s determination to find ways of escaping the conventional racism of her upbringing this is remarkably forward-looking for its time. Then there is ‘Telephone Call’, in which a woman gradually splits up with her boyfriend over the demands of caring for her father, whose querulous demands are continually registered off-stage. This is a remorselessly bleak, heartbreaking piece, as topical today as it was when it was written.

Finally, in ‘Dear Francois’, Knight delivers a dark but energetically defiant plea from a single mother, which takes her into unexpected territory - though it is of a piece with her general assertion of the possibility of sprightly survival in testing times. All three of these monologues could stand alongside Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads in quality of psychological insight and authority of character, and you have to wonder in point of fact how far Bennett himself was influenced by Grenfell in his own later work in this genre.

The show also is notable for reintroducing a song written for the Aldeburgh Festival in 1967 as a tribute to Benjamin Britten. This is a jazzy, verbally intricate piece of operatic spoofery that has probably never been performed since. It serves to remind us that Grenfell was capable of far more as singer and lyricist than she normally ventured.

It leaves us with a slight regret that, as with so many English comedians of her generation, she did not emerge more often from the comfort zone in which she had successfully built her reputation. We can be very grateful though to the Knights for demonstrating how brightly her legacy, both comic and quietly tragic, still shines.

Turn Back The Clock run at the St James Studio until 14 June 2015