Jun 10, 2006 21:13
When I came back I promised you meaty posts and have since blogged on birds, sniffles, clowns and bras - and can
I just say that it is slightly disturbing just how much interest the Great Tits and bras post generated compared to my usual haul of comments? I must be flippant and saucy more often! Here however is 'Post With Ideas' number one.
A few weeks ago I, quite by chance, heard an Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4. I spent the guts of the next hour standing up in the kitchen finding jobs to do so I had an excuse to stay and listen until the end. It knocked my socks off! Later research revealed it was called Stan and was by Neil Brand. The radio play is a two hander but only one actor has lines as such. This version had Tom Courtenay playing an aging Stan Laurel who is visiting Oliver Hardy in what were to be his last days. Hardy has had a massive stroke, cannot talk, and nobody is even sure if he understands what is being said to him or has any memories of his earlier life. It is not quite a monologue though as the two do interact. It was an amazingly claustrophobic piece of drama, with Laurel trapped in this awful room trying to make one sided conversation while desperate at confronting his own mortality. Now after assorted plays and biographies I am more familiar than most with details of the lives of these two performers but there was still so much that was new here, just the intensity, the constant, relentless close-up of it. Courtenay even had the voice right, that halfway Scots/Californian drawl that was so unique to Laurel. Obviously it was mostly made up but every detail rang true. And the old hackneyed stories like the feuds with the studios, the discrepancy in salary between Laurel and Hardy, the serial wives, and even the Cobh bells tribute were given a fresh perspective. If you ever get a chance to hear it - do! Sadly it is not available on the Listen-Again service over the web.
I was moved to write it up though because it has since been made into a TV play as part of BBC Four (TV)'s silent movie tribute season. And boy did it suck! OK, having heard the original I was biased but it seemed that so little of what made the radio play work so well was left. Worst of all it kept changing scenes and all the flashback scenes were played out rather than described by Laurel. They kept on letting you out of the room. Plus the actor playing young Laurel (my Google fu has failed me to find out who played him) had pretty much mastered the distinctive voice but Jim Norton, who played him when he was old, played it without mimicking. Brand had reworked the play himself and seemed to leap wholesale into the 'show don't tell' camp. Sadly what made the Radio version so strong was that every word comes filtered through Laurel and is therefore deeply biased, screwed up, emotional and unreliable as Hell and that was what made it interesting. It's not really fair to say it sucked - as all the performances are good and some new stuff added in is interesting enough - but the TV certainly wasn't a patch on the original.
drama,
review,
radio_4,
stan