Review: Behind You! New Wimbledon Theatre Studio
Review: Behind You! New Wimbledon Theatre Studio
“a must-see for those whose teeth ache at the saccharine sweetness of regular panto.” Review by Jenny Booth.
Backstage in a provincial theatre a few days after Christmas, a thickset bald man in heavy makeup and a flowered dress is gloating over a copy of The Stage, where a rival panto dame has received a bad review. Clifford’s nerves are frayed because a big shot producer is due to watch the show that night. Two pieces of bad luck have already happened, and he is superstitiously convinced that bad luck comes in threes. If the show fails to impress that means no work when the run ends, just months of staring at the walls of his flat in Loughborough.
Like a panto-themed cross between The Dresser and Noises Off, Behind You! is a comic glimpse of the distinctly unsparkly life in the dressing room. Clifford (David Gillespie) and the Twinkle Twins comedy double act he shares the room with (Dave Marsden and Pat Abernethy) are washed up performers, whose dreams of stardom have faded after many disappointments but have refused entirely to die. The trio snap at each other as tension mounts in the wait for curtain up, and their farcical bickering becomes tinged with pathos as their secrets start to tumble out.
Marsden is also the playwright who penned Behind You!, and his skilful script is shot through with irony and black humour. On opening night, not all of these qualities quite made it across the footlights. At times the show could have done with an injection of panto-style exaggeration and energy. particularly from David Gillespie, whose comparatively measured tones were at war with his character’s often bitchy and histrionic lines. But both sides of his character came together perfectly in the suppressed violence of his final address, direct to the real and imaginary audience, stripping us of the last shreds of the illusion of jollity, and bidding us goodnight with a resounding: “Alright, f*** you, then!” It’s a must-see for those whose teeth ache at the saccharine sweetness of regular panto
