A Little of What You Fancy, as the queen of the saucy song, Marie Lloyd, used to suggest to her music hall audiences, does you good. Salisbury Playhouse’s celebratory invocation of the heyday of live mass entertainment proves her point. Musical director (and performer) Glyn Kerslake and Salisbury’s artistic director Gareth Machin set about recreating the gallimaufry of a Victorian extravaganza on miniature scale. A bill featuring 30-odd acts, with all their paraphernalia of sets and props, is evoked via four performers, a grand piano and a carpet with a double identity. A clever and simple conceit allows the transformation.
We are guests of a Victorian couple who, assisted by his brother and their maid, propose to amuse us with an evening of songs, “sketches, skits and scares” (the promised “aerial daring” seems to have slipped off the bill). The venue is their drawing room – Zoe Squire’s set and costumes are TV-series period-perfect, but with added zest of wit that makes the ordinary extraordinary, including shadow surprises thanks to Dave Marsh’s lighting.
This seeming simplicity gives maximum impact to lyrics that I, for one, thought I knew but had seldom truly listened to. Kerslake’s arrangements allow the performers to explore unexpected emotional nuances, as in Rebecca Trehearn’s rendering of I Live in Trafalgar Square, which creates pathos without sentimentality.
However, in spite of the very good efforts of the company, including Adrian Grove’s master of ceremonies and Sophie Evans’s all-innocence maid, there is an archness to the conceit that cramps the performance, as if it were held in stays, like a Victorian matron. A more “rough theatre” approach could liberate the material and bring out the fun in the implicit correspondences between that age and our own.
• A Little of What You Fancy is at Salisbury Playhouse until 21 January
