BEING born in the 1940s is not the only thing that Linda Marlowe and Janet Street-Porter have in common. They both look the way they do — and, to be fair, they look pretty good — without resorting to Botox.
You might expect to find this sort of information in a magazine. In fact, both make the boast as part of their one-woman, confessional, my-life-so-far shows on this year’s Fringe. It indicates how both concentrate more on their personal than professional lives.
I suppose when you get to their age (Marlowe is 61, Street-Porter 56) you are bound to have accumulated enough amusing or touching incidents to make up an hour or so’s worth of material. You might also have accumulated enough discretion to keep it to yourself, but that would be all the duller for the rest of us.
In Marlowe’s case there is, among others, my time as a drugs mule, my time meeting Marilyn Monroe, my time discovering lesbian love (“not conquered but discovered”), my time playing my husband’s lover for a private detective in order to get the evidence for a divorce. Her play No Fear!, at the Assembly Rooms, is well enough written (mostly by Gavin Marshall, who also directs) and Marlowe is as lovely a performer as ever. But, as she concludes with a few moves on the flying trapeze which she has recently taught herself, you cannot quite escape the echoes of a little girl still showing off to Mum and Dad.
Street-Porter treats us, in her show, All The Rage, also at the Assembly Rooms, to hating her Mum and Dad (with good reason, if she is to be believed), losing her virginity to a black man in Islington, serial monogamy (a racy Channel Five sort of serial, admittedly, but monogamy for all that) and rambling (the hill-walking kind, that is).
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Whatever Street-Porter is, and she has been many things, an actress is not one of them. The experienced writer and director David Benson has helped her get her story into some sort of dramatic shape. But for all her media savvy and her experience of public platforms, there is a gawky nervousness about being just her alone on stage with only a crib sheet of cues taped to the floor like a band’s song list.
Actually, a bit of vulnerability does her no harm at all. The audience wills her on and if it wasn’t for the clips she plays of her behaving madly on television, you might even get to like her. Quite what she thinks the show is going to do for her career is anybody’s guess. But after you’ve been offered Celebrity Colonic Irrigation, Celebrity Wife-Swap and Gender Switch on television, there is really only one way to go.