‘Old-fashioned,” Maureen Lipman calls herself at the start of Up for It, and the term certainly applies to her show, a medley of music and standup, character comedy and counter-revolutionary views on #MeToo. It is, she says, the kind of cabaret that she and co-star, jazz singer Jacqui Dankworth, would enjoy, and will likewise appeal to anyone drawn to big personalities, old jokes and music so smooth you could slide a whisky tumbler down it.
Lipman starts as she means to go on, mixing self-deprecation (“You thought your wife had booked to see Su Pollard”) with steely self-regard. “People like me, we’re shunted aside these days,” she complains, notwithstanding her casting last week in Coronation Street. There follows a monologue about 21st-century telly, in which Miriam Margolyes farts her way around the world and Lipman hosts a show called Walking with Wrinklies.
There’s more satirical bite to the section than the show’s easy-listening stylings (Charlie Wood tinkling on the piano and Harry Shearer – of all people – thrumming the bass guitar) might suggest. We even get a Theresa May impersonation: the PM’s ill-at-ease posture immediately identifiable. This comes in a series of three Talking Heads-style monologues delivered by a beleaguered mother, a medic administering a mammogram and a northern cafe proprietress. They’re short, incongruous, pertly written and raise a smile.
And so this lucky dip of a show goes on: a song from Dankworth is followed by Lipman’s hack standup skit about public toilets, before she dances the tango with a timorous audience volunteer. Most striking of all – mainly because it visibly enraged the woman sitting in front of me – was Lipman’s routine on #MeToo, which argued that women should be grateful for their better-than-ever lives. This progresses from the tale of Lipman’s very faint brush with male sexual predation, via a fond anecdote about working with Roman Polanski, to her claim that there’s something to be said for female submissiveness because “submission is a kind of power”.
These sentiments could hardly be further off-trend at this year’s fringe, and land with a clunk in a show that otherwise plays safe with lightly entertaining old Jewish jokes, saucy limericks and sultry jazz. Lipman says of showbiz bosses: “They don’t know what to do with me any more.” On the evidence of this ragbag of sketch, song and tendentious opinion, you can hardly blame them.
- At Assembly George Square Theatre, Edinburgh, until 12 August.
