Lea Anderson disbanded her companies – the all-female Cholmondeleys and all-male Featherstonehaughs – after her funding was axed in 2011, and it’s hard not to hear a pang of longing for them in the title of her new cabaret-style work, Ladies and Gentlemen.
But the piece is no exercise in nostalgia; rather, Anderson takes ideas of regret and failure and transforms them into a delightfully surreal theatrical gem.
A gem made of paste, for everything in Tim Spooner’s production design feels cobbled together: the paraphernalia that litters the stage (instrument stands, lampshades, glasses, teacloths); the dismaying thermal underwear, stuck with random collars and bonnets; the false moustaches and cardboard eyes. The scenario is simple: a family of has-been music-hall performers – Man, Woman, the Twins, Pet and the Other One – try and fail to revive their lost stage magic. To the desultory encouragement of rattles and whistles, Woman makes her hands into animal shapes – dog, duck, deer – and succeeds in underwhelming even herself. Pet does a ventriloquism act, transparently voiced by a Twin behind a clear plastic sheet. Man sings a sad ditty and the others respond with an inappropriate chorus of deadpan laughs, timed exactly to composer Steve Blake’s wittily wrongfooting musical measures.
It is the opposite of a magic show. Instead of misdirecting us to the theatrical illusion, Anderson emphasises disenchantment, constantly pointing to stagey, workaday mechanisms, the performers even muttering their own stage directions in between numbers. Inevitably perhaps, the piece sometimes crosses the line between artful and actual bathos – yet it is beguiling, often hilarious, and even touches pathos.
There are pangs and pleasures in the scene where a silver-voiced chorus sings “magic window, tragic window”, while the Other One holds up a cardboard frame and Woman drolly manipulates meaningless shapes behind it. You sense the small wonder and pity of ordinary things.
