You wait almost 40 years for a fitting memorial to Dame Gracie Fields and then three come along at once. A new heritage trail enables you to follow the clogs of Lancashire’s greatest mill-worker. Her likeness is to be the first new statue erected in Rochdale since Victorian times. And then there is this play by Philip Goulding, which provides an affectionate, if rather unrevealing, homage to Gracie’s progress from a flat above a chip shop to a villa in Capri.
It’s staggering to consider that by the 1930s Fields had become the highest paid entertainer in the world, exerting the kind of star power that made Hollywood bosses bow to her demand that all her films, including the classic Sally in Our Alley, be shot in England. Yet she remained the most down-to-earth diva: her final, happiest marriage was to a Romanian radio repair man who came to do odd jobs around the villa.
Goulding’s play takes the form of a revue in which an Oldham repertory company welcomes back the greatest star to have trodden its boards. And in Sue Devaney’s uncannily fine impersonation it really does seem as if Gracie is back in the building. But though the highlights are celebrated, the turbulence of Fields’s life goes largely unexplored. You never really find out how she was affected by her first marriage to music-hall maven Archie Pitt, who delivered on the promise of making her a star yet insisted she live in the same house as his mistress. And her close brush with cervical cancer is summarised with a characteristic quip: “Doctor, will I be able to ride a unicycle after this? Good – because I couldn’t before”.
The brief scene in which she duets with the little Parisian sparrow makes it clear that Our Gracie is no match for Piaf. But fans of Sally should find it right up their alley.
- At Coliseum, Oldham, until 26 March. Box office: 0161-624 2829 And New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme from 6-23 April. Box office: 0178-2717 962.
