Prisoner Cell Block H, The Musical
Music and lyrics by Don Battye and Peter Pinne
With Lily Savage: Queens Theatre

Occasionally life throws you one of those surreal curves. You begin to wonder at your own sanity. And here it is.

Having spent the entire day incarcerated on a real-life jury, to be finally released into the night and asked to pass judgement on Prisoner Cell Block H is to know the true meaning of the word 'serendipity'.

The sight of the redoubtable Lily Savage rising out of a makeshift dock swathed in a black chiffon turban and doing a Bette Davis - I am Inn-oh-cent, I tell yo'! - is the answer to anyone who has wondered why this theatre was called the Queens. This is, for those still bemused, the musical incarnation of the Australian soap opera set in a female prison which put cult into culture, but only of the fungal variety. As a show it defies description, Suffice it to say, I cannot remember when I laughed so immoderately at so unashamed kitsch.

Not being a devotee of the series, the true awfulness of the acting, the cheesiness of the plots and the flimsiness of the scenery was something one could only relate to having come across the occasional episode of Crossroads. Yet David McVicar's wild and wilful direction manages to raise all this to the level of pop art.

Repeating her role from the original farrago comes Maggie Kirkpatrick as the appalling 'Freak' Ferguson, whose ideas on Prison discipline make Michael Howard's propsed reforms look like a New Age traveller's campsite. It is a brilliant piece of camp parody on a role I had always believed she played for real. Still sending the sales of blue denim plummeting are the inamtes with their smaller-than-life dramas but now set to music, which is at times so deliciously tacky as to be memorable.

There are performances of such knowing culpability that anywhere else they would carry life sentences, particularly in Terry Neason's butch bully, Steff, and Liz Smith's daffy dotage delight.

Yet it is Lily Savage whose presence (and occasional additional lyrics and dialogue) ensure the unstinting success of this unlikely piece. She has become the sort of monster creature who gives bad taste a good name.

Now she triumphantly transcends mere drag artistry. She is a fully-fledged West Ender in the mould of Dame Edna Everage herself.

If only real life court was as much fun as this.

Jack Tinker 
(At last night's first night)
Daily Mail - 1995