In its opening musical number, Deborah McAndrew’s freely adapted version of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide manages to find an original rhyme with its lead protagonist’s name, Simeon Duff. It has been re-set in “a port in the north west of England” and this opener might draw us to the city it is playing in this week. By the time we have met all the other characters however, we could be anywhere between Heysham and Grimsby!
Simeon Duff is fed up. He is doomed to staying at home while his wife Mary goes out to work and it’s denting his pride. When some confusion over a sausage leads people to think he’s ready to end it all, he begins to think that might be for the best. Unfortunately this seems to offer endless possibilities for various townsfolk to have someone make a Grand Gesture in the name of their personal cause.
His landlord has taken fees from them all and arranged the event before Simeon’s feet start to get as cold as his sausage.
There is a serious point underlying all this, and in these times of austerity some of it could become a bit too close for comfort in a more serious reading, but McAndrew’s earthy, comic script and Conrad Nelson’s uproarious direction ensure that it keeps the laughometer needle well up the scale.
As we have come to expect from Northern Broadsides, there are a great many larger than life characterisations, none more so than Alan Chadwick’s Al Bush, Robert Pickavance's outrageous Victor Stark and Alan McMahon's Father McCloud. But the show is stolen by two strikingly sympathetic performances by Mike Hugo and Samantha Robinson as Simeon and Mary, and by Angie Bain’s teacup and egg-nog wielding Sadie, who seems to make more than a gentle nod toward Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle.
All the music in the show is performed live on stage by the actors and while this is a little incongruous in some places it provides a lot more opportunities for humour and shamelessly dreadful rhymes, and later adds weight to the drama.
The set by production designer Dawn Alsop is imaginative and about as off kilter and distressed as the lives of its inhabitants and Mark Howland has lit the piece imaginatively too, although I could have done with slightly less of it in near total darkness in the early scenes.
Russian literature and drama is very much in evidence on the stage at present and I have seen at least five examples this year, from Gorky to Gogol and Dostoevsky to Bulgakov and ranging from the surreal and absurd to social realism. This re-imagining of The Suicide aims straight for the absurd and gets there with a lot of humour. We’re told that Stanislavski fell off his chair laughing when he first read the original, and it seems that this irreverent romp of an evening has set out to do the same to its audiences, but with the traditional twist in the tale.
Set your minds in Panto mode for the first act folks, but be prepared for an emotional shift in act two, when the play really reveals its heart on its sleeve.
The Grand Gesture is at Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday 16th November 2013. It then continues its tour at the Stephen Joseph Theatre Scarborough and the Viaduct Theatre Halifax until 30th November.
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