To round off the evening we spent an hour or so in the company of three comedians, billed as the compere told us, of the Eighties or Nineties persuasion. The venue, sparsely attended, had almost an end-of -the pier ambience as Milton Jones, Hatty Hayridge and Boothby Graffoe went through their paces. What do I remember? Milton Jones: "any students in tonight? Your house smells.They had to be told." Hatty Hayridge, whose public recognition briefly increased as a cast member on Red Dwarf had a stage personna that made me think she was about to throw herself off the nearest castle; Boothby Graffoe, who had us self-consciously singing along to a song about a baseball-playing spider. Alcohol helps in these situations.
Rosebud was my final show before going home. A one-man play portraying the life of Orson Welles, this really was a delightful production from beginning to end: Christian Mckay appears out of the shadows to become Harry Lime, before Orson orders the zither music to be exterminated; the superbly-delivered anecdotage about The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane (was "rosebud" really William Randolph Hearst's pet name for an intimate part of his mistress's body?); the denoument of Welles recording voiceovers for frozen pea commercials. All really rather wonderful.
Well, I managed to get through three days of the festival without once stumbling across a minor celebrity and embarassing myself. Last year, I found myself in the Assembly Rooms, and before I knew what I was doing, I pointed and remarked, rather too loudly.."NICHOLAS PARSONS!" as the man himself walked past...I blame this performance on a mixture of a mild form of undiagnosed Tourette's Syndrome, combimed with being forced to watch Sale of the Century at my grandmother's in the Seventies. Child abuse, that's what it was. |
