Peter Viney's Blog

Vulcan 7
by Ade Edmondson & Nigel Planer

Directed by Steve Marmion
Designed by Simon Higlett

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford
Saturday 22nd September 2018, 14.30

CAST:
Ade Edmondson – Gary Savage
Nigel Planer- Hugh Delavois
Lois Chimimba – Leela, their film runner

Ade Edmondson as Gary Savage (in Thermidion costume) and Nigel Planer as Hugh Delavois (posed photo, Gary in Act 1 costume, Hugh in Act 2 costume 😉

What a delight to see two of The Young Ones together again. Their self-written play opens in Guildford at the start of a three month UK tour. I guess the category is “back stage,” though on a movie, not a play. The thing is, as writers and as actors they have been there and done it.

Plot: The actors Gary Savage (Ade Edmondson)and Hugh Delavois (Nigel Planer) were at RADA together decades earlier. Back then, Gary took all the lead parts in the most serious of dramas, and went on to star on stage with everyone you’ve ever heard of. Hugh became a resentful supporting role actor. They’re now on a glacier in Iceland making the seventh film in the Vulcan fantasy series. Hugh Delavois has been in the Vulcan franchise for seven years, since the very beginning, as the English butler. He’s important. He gets his own trailer. He’s constantly on the phone to his house where the cat sitter (!) is up to no good.

Nigel Planer as Hugh Delavois

After being a major theatre star, Gary Savage became a Hollywood A-lister, but that is now in the past. He is now reduced to a one line cameo in the film as a Thermidon (alien), which requires four hours in make-up. They are forced by circumstances to share Hugh’s trailer … but outside the trailer everything’s going wrong: the director’s gone missing while on a recce further up the glacier, the catering truck’s on the other side of a ravine, the bridge across the ravine is getting riskier by the minute, and the volcanic activity is growing more and more lively. The production runner, Leela, (Lois Chimimba) has to hold it all together, with good news … and bad news. Leela is a student, who started a course on seismology in Iceland, but prefers an esoteric view of vulcanology to a scientific one.

We learn about the actors. They both have stage names now. The RP-speaking Hugh complains that he sounds posh, though he was from a working class one-parent family. In contrast, Gary’s parents and education were moneyed elite, but he speaks “off.” That’s so true. I always notice that fake Nigel Kennedy effect. The public school boy who says “Cheers, mate. Awright? Fucking great day, innit?” As so many of them do.

Hugh’s trailer

The set design is by Simon Higlett, surely the current greatest realistic theatre designer … RSC Love’s Labour’s Lost / Love’s Labour’s Won, Racing Demon at Bath, The Norman Conquests and The Chalk Garden at Chichester. The set is Hugh Delavois’s trailer on a glacier in Iceland (and it’s mobile too). As ever with Simon Higlett, the detail is perfect.

Throughout, the sound design (Mic Pool) is equally brilliant. Every time the trailer door opens, the howling gale outside is heard, and stops immediately it closes. A helicopter flies over our heads … oddly the last time we heard that in a theatre, it was Rik Mayall in The New Statesman. The avalanches and eruptions shake the theatre.

They have history …

It was inevitably a game of two halves … as Gary might have said … or a play of two acts, both short (40 minutes and 45 minutes). We found the first act slightly laboured and rather slow to take off, while the second act was superb pitch-perfect consummate comedy. It relies to a degree on The Young Ones personas: Ade Edmondson as the wild one, Nigel Planer as the solemn serious one. No, they’re not Vyvyan and Neil in any way, but they are the anarchic v the lugubrious.

Ade Edmondson, especially in Act Two gave a phenomenal comic clown performance as he got drunk, while spouting King Lear. (You were much too young for it, complains Hugh). Gary explains that his problem is not that he can’t remember lines, but that he can never forget them once learned. I’ve met actors like that. One gave us a list of Shakespeare roles he’d played, and we entertained ourselves while waiting for film set-ups with a Complete Works, reading a line and inevitably he could give the next one.

As with Morecambe and Wise, the comic (Ade) only shines because of the foil (Nigel).  I suspect that Ade’s natural movement is so hampered by the monster alien costume that he’s more entertaining once the costume and wig are off, as they are in Act Two. They list understudies in the programme, but frankly it IS all about Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planer as much as the play, and you’d be very pissed off if you saw their roles understudied.

Overall, there are a lot … possibly even too many … theatrical in-jokes. The Mark Rylance references were funny to us, but I’m not convinced that Mark Rylance is a major character to the average person rather than the star of Wolf Hall plus  a “best supporting actor” in a couple of movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis is also getting arcane.

Lois Chimimba as Leela, the production runner

On the other hand (a key plot point) it is true that the many junior runners (such as Lois Chimimba’s Leela here)  are related to someone with influence in the production. Her mother’s the casting director, who had RADA intimate relationships with both Gary and Hugh. My son got production experience as a runner on some of our video series, as did our producer’s kids, and some of the actors’ kids. The runners are part of the whole thing, but how many of the general theatre audience know that? I think back to one of our video series where we had an ageing semi-retired actress in an outdoor cameo, who had once been a major star. The director assigned a runner to look after her personally … blankets, tea, biscuits, chairs. After the filming we received a lovely hand-written note in real ink thanking us and praising the runner to the skies (my son). That’s what you do in her position. Noblesse oblige. Runners are important. And I bet she did it nearly every time, which is why she was much loved.

A rose between thorns …

Lois has just such an important role as the 24 year old runner dealing with these two combative Thespians in their 60s … and she’s a rose between thorns. These guys, Ade and Nigel, have been working together for forty years. She fits in charmingly and I am avoiding plot spoilers too. A lot of the humour is the two older men trying to adjust to what they can and can’t say to a 24 year old woman in 2018.

A minus: at 40 minutes and 45 minutes, you don’t need a full twenty minute interval, very few need a pee or an ice cream. It’s just hanging about.

Theatres. It’s the second Guildford matinee we’ve been to that’s no more than a third to 40% full. Yet again, I wonder about the population profile that regularly fills Bath Theatre Royal, Chichester Festival and Salisbury Playhouse at matinees, but elsewhere people turn up in such limited numbers at Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Winchester’s Theatre Royal, Southampton Nuffield or Poole Lighthouse? It may be demographics and a tendency to play to it with Rattigan or Coward plays, or older stars in more modern ones. Bath’s matinee audience told there were stars of The Young Ones on stage, might think of Cliff Richard’s 1962 film rather than Neil and Vyvyan from the early 1980s TV series; even then they might think of it as a film their younger siblings enjoyed. In which case, it might be that the sci-fi / fantasy picture used to advertise it in Season Brochures is misleading. As far as plot goes this is a funnier play in the style of The Dresser rather than a cod sci-fi piece.

We had spent the morning in Guildford, with my companion shopping for clothes. She got into three friendly conversations with young assistants who asked what we were doing (she said we’d come from Poole). She told them about the play and the brief synopsis we’d read, and they were very interested and had seen The Young Ones in cult TV revivals. But had no idea the play was on.

A less than full theatre makes it harder for the cast … I reckon they can look forward to more laughter and feedback from more crowded theatres on the tour.

The morning after seeing it, we opened the newspaper to see that an Icelandic volcano erupts every 50 years catastrophically, but it’s now 50 years overdue and has 3000 feet of glacier on top of it … and seismologists say it’s about to blow. There’s synchronicity for you, and they can’t have known it when they were writing.

Overall? ****

UK Tour Autumn 2018
19 – 29 September Guildford
1 – 6 October Cambridge
8 – 13 October Newcastle
15 – 20 October Bath
22 – 27 October Richmond
29 Oct – 3 Nov Malvern
5 – 10 November Edinburgh

LINKS TO REVIEWS ON THIS BLOG

ADE EDMONDSON
Twelfth Night, RSC 2017

LOIS CHIMIMBA
wonder.land, National Theatre 2016