Wow, what a performance. Or rather, wow, what a series of performances. For her one-woman homage to the Carry On comedian Charles Hawtrey, Amanda Lawrence doesn’t stop at a pair of round glasses and a purse-lipped chirpiness. Nor is this the sort of tribute show where one actor plays another actor faithfully recounting the highlights of their life.
Instead, what Lawrence and her director Paul Hunter have cooked up is an impressionistic guide to Hawtrey’s life in which Lawrence plays about 50 other roles too. With a West Country lilt she’s the chairman of the Carry On Appreciation Society, Bideford branch, come to Deal in Kent to doorstop Hawtrey in his final days — and to find that he’s a dyspeptic dipsomaniac, despised by the locals. With a twist of her head she’s Italia Conti, the head of his drama school; with a sympathetic set of the lips she’s Hawtrey’s supportive, bumptious mum.
And though Cathy Wren’s design is — deliberately — messy, with props and gin bottles and costumes strewn around a stage with a flatplan of a house marked out on it, Lawrence does a neat job of elliding from one time to another. Eating a sandwich on set in 1948, she finds a letter, then reads it out — and it’s a rejection letter from 1954. Brilliant! One minute it’s 1980s dissolution; the next it’s 1940s optimism, as young Charlie Hartree changes his name to Hawtrey — after the actor-manager Sir Charles Hawtrey — and gets his break working with Will Hay, then a giant of the British box office.
But, great though Lawrence’s turn is, evocative though Jules Maxwell’s sound design is, the style is the content here. The story is there to serve the performance rather than the other way round. Behind the multitasking, Lawrence doesn’t have a take on her subject, except to say that he was a far gnarlier character offscreen than on. But so what? After a jaunty start, Jiggery Pokery gets tipsy on its own sadness, touching on struggles to get work, his rows with his ailing mum, his drinking on-set, his death from gangrene in 1988.
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But not a lot of laughs — or not from Hawtrey’s quivering lips, anyway. There is precious little to suggest why Hawtrey should be a film icon, a comedy icon, a gay icon. Without evidence of his genius, if that’s what it was, all the glorious little bits of business bear a stronger whiff of drama workshop than they do of Charles Hawtrey. So I found Jiffery Pokery impressive — and ultimately oppressive.
Box office: 020-7223 2223, to Dec 19