The Dame has a tender genesis story: writer Katie Duncan was inspired by music-hall entertainers only to find that her own family history was littered with them. She wrote the play and enlisted her father, former Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan, to play the pantomime dame in this one-man show.
Duncan emerges on stage as Ronald Roy Humphrey in full, flamboyant regalia: yellow conical hat, painted eyebrows and frou-frou dress. The play is a monologue, delivered in his dressing room, and he enters just after extracting himself from his fans.
The stage is set for a focused character study – a piece of theatre about a life in theatre – and that is just what we get as the dame wipes off his “battle face” and the real Ronald is revealed. Camp bonhomie dissolves into misty-eyed vignettes and then, perhaps too predictably, his story takes darker turns into a tormented childhood from which he finds escape in performance and drag in later life.
Duncan is a pantomime stalwart and brings a bright-eyed “show-must-go-on” stoicism to his role, but for all his physical energy, he lacks both the archness and the vulnerability needed to bring the character and his anguished past truly alive. His singing voice becomes fainter as the production unfolds, to reflect a breathless performer well past his prime, but these deliberately faltering moments do not have enough emotional purchase.
Ronald’s childhood of family abuse, separation and loss is affecting but verges on the generic narrative of a child performer, pushed on to the stage by an overbearing and violent father with a loving but undermined mother in the shadows.
The script pays homage to music-hall greats from Charlie Chaplin to Dan Leno but these interludes feel bolted on, taking us outside Ronald’s story, and the potted biographies of these inwardly troubled comic geniuses rehearse the over-familiar idea of the tears of a clown. There are some lovely moments nonetheless, such as Duncan’s sparky turns as Widow Twankey and Dame Trott and his poignant rendition of Look for the Silver Lining. Peter Humphrey’s set comprises a dressing room filled with bonnets, dresses and a light-bulb mirror, and it reeks of the magic of theatre but also the faded glory of seaside entertainment. Most of all, Duncan’s performance is heroic in its heartfelt earnestness, even if this feels by the end like a play whose parts have not quite come together.
At Park theatre, London, until 26 January
