I'm known for my occasional bouts of fannish insanity. Once in a while I'll get it into my head to do something nuts and move heaven&earth to achieve it. I've taken solo trans-Atlantic flights to see a single gig, I've run all over Germany with like minded fans to see every gig in a tour, and I once had to rescued from Edinburgh by the very people I was following. Not all of these plans have ended well, such is the way with fandom. As my health has deteriorated in recent years my ability to do crazy things has been curtailed. The last time I went to a gig alone, I went to a Gary Numan gig with a broken rib and had to be rescued twice due to being near collapse. That calmed me down a lot and I've resisted even looking at the dates for most tours and shows since then. If it's not showing in Sheffield and I can't get someone to go with me, I'm not going to think about. Last week I broke my own rules. We're big fans of The Thick of It in this house, and as mentioned in my last post they were recently filming the fourth season. As such I thought that Peter Capaldi's run in The Ladykillers had ended. [Some background- The Ladykillers is an adaptation of the Ealing comedy being performed in London, which is 3-4 hours from here by train. Far too far for me to consider normally.] I was good, I didn't intentionally look into it, or google the show or anything. Then a friend on Twitter retweeted that it was actually closing on Saturday and that there were some tickets on sale at a reduced price.
If you're not part of a fandom you might never have felt that creeping grip of "gotta do it, gotta do it" excitement that such news brings, but it's a bit intoxicating and, considering my health, a bit frightening. I decided to go, I was feeling better than I had in a while and it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Then overnight my health crashed and I started to panic. I wanted to go but I couldn't go alone any more. Thankfully a dear friend was willing to join the insanity and less than 24 hours before the matinee show we had tickets and a plan.
Getting to London was the first trial, since it involved a bus and two trains, none of which I cope that well on. Sitting for long periods for me can be worse than standing and going through tunnels is horrible since I can't correct the pressure in my ears. There was the fun of getting from St Pancreas Station to Shaftesbury Avenue. I can't travel by underground any more, they give me flashbacks to 15th June 1996, so we ended up walking/limping the 2 miles from the station to the theatre, including a brief detour caused by the giant gold Freddie Mercury statue on Oxford Street. We arrived 30 minutes before the show started and managed to squeeze through the press of people to our seats. Aisle seats are great on one hand because you can actually stretch your legs out, but less great when you have to keep standing up to let people pass whilst juggling a cane, program and drinks.
On to the show itself. A lot has already been said about this elsewhere online, but the set really was amazing. A long time ago, in another life, I wanted to be a theatre designer, and I think if I'd seen this show then I wouldn't have given up on it. We were sitting too far back to see the upper left corner (which was a bit plot critical) but what we could see was brilliant. You can see pictures of it towards the bottom of this page. It was a rotating set that included the front of the house, the roof at the back, the interior split into three levels and a train tunnel. The front of the house also doubled as the set for the most ingenious car chase I've seen in years. Each time a train passed by furniture in the interior set would move around and the various methods of getting the cast around the set were very clever. The set was practically a member of the cast as it moved, changed and interacted with each in turn, plus there was the ever present 'parrot' in a cage at the front of the set, which stole the scene on several occasions.In terms of the cast, Peter Capaldi as Professor Marcus was the reason I wanted to go, but the entire ensemble was amazing. Sherlock's Stephen Wight was brilliant as the drug-addled Harry and had some fantastically well timed moments of slapstick comedy. James Fleet was adorable and charming as Major Countney. The big surprise for me was Ben Miller. I've always been a fan of the Armstrong and Miller Show, and I stuck with Primeval because he was so good as James Lester, but his performance as the psychotic Romanian with an irrational fear of little old ladies was spot on. In terms of skill Marcia Warren's portrayal of Mrs Wilberforce was a lesson in itself, maintaining the stooped and shuffling movements of an elderly person whilst managing half of a slapstick routine clearly took a huge amount of work.
One of the major themes of the physical comedy was that Mrs Wilberforce was constantly standing on Professor Marcus' scarf, and we heard some people complaining during interval that some of those moments looked a little bit forced. I've study acting, and the friend that was with me is a drama degree student, and the concentration necessary to hit a mark, get lines right, step on a moving strip of fabric that you CANNOT LOOK AT and not accidentally kill your co-star, is extraordinary. There are going to be occasions when one actor or another has to make an adjustment for the performance to continue to flow and if it's something tied around one actors neck, you have to be a bit careful with it. Seriously, if you're going to complain about tiny things like that in a live show, then go home and watch TV where they can do a hundred takes, that you don't have to see, to get it right.
Peter Capaldi's performance as Professor Marcus was definitely the highlight of the show. It was big, it was bold, it was just this side of camp and it perfectly mixed genuinely creepy with disarmingly charming. Great characterisation and attention to detail, especially when it came to movement and gestures. His accent did slip once or twice (as did Ben Miller's 'Romanian' accent) but since the character is supposed to be a fraud (and Peter Capaldi sounds awesome when he's angry) it wasn't enough to distract from the scene. I was a little concerned by the shots online where Peter's hair was slicked back in a very creepy fashion, but since he has had it cut for the new The Thick of It series, it looked much better. The character's faux horror film entrance was a brilliant sequence that had the audience laughing without a word being spoken, and the final fight between Marcus and Louis (Ben Miller) was a perfect showcase for both actors dramatic skills. Overall the best non-musical comedy I've seen in a decade, two and a half hours of solid laughter, thrills, spills, robbery and murder. As I mentioned before the show closed on Saturday, but if you ever see a production being staged near you I urge you to go and see it.
After the show we went to the stage door in the hope of getting some autographs. First up we met the lovely James Fleet, who was charming, and got a bit flustered by my silver pen (a hold over from attending years of goth gigs where all merchandising is black). Then Ben Miller came out and was very sweet, also confused by the pen of doom and let us pose for photos with him. Unfortunately I was shaking really badly due to lack of food and pain meds (both of which I had to forgo in order to actually manage to survive the day), that's why I'm blurry but he isn't. I missed Stephen Wight due to being pushed by a really annoying autograph tout (who constantly asked if people 'were cast' and ended up with signatures from a lot of stage hands). After an hour waiting in the cold we had to admit that no one else would be coming out and head home. One of the major issues with having a chronic condition is the long term effect of your actions. You can tell people that something will hurt or that it'll exhaust you but unless you've lived with it, or with a loved one who has it, the true effects can be hard to explain. We got home 15 hours after we left, having walked four miles across London and back, spent seven hours on trains and buses, stood in the cold for two hours and laughed in an over heated room for two and half hours. In that time I was unable to eat anything substantial (two biscuits) or take any of my pain medication. To paraphrase Robert Downey Junior's Sherlock Holmes - in summary: back spasming; left shoulder, hand & hip dislocated; right hand swollen due to cane use; broken rib bruised by laughing too much. Physical recovery: 6 weeks. Full psychological recovery: 6 months. Ability to function as a human being: neutralised.
Was it worth it? Yes. Would I do it again any time soon? No. But then I said that after the Gary Numan debacle. *shrug*
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