The play I saw at
the Vaudeville last week is a revival of the classic 1955 Ealing comedy
directed by Alexander Mackendrick. That it all seemed a bit lacklustre was not for
want of any acting ability by the cast, although it didn’t help that my friend
and I had seats in the back row of the stalls. Some of the dialogue was lost.
The idea for the
film screenplay came to William Rose in a dream: five criminals, intent on seizing
money from a delivery van at Kings Cross, plan the heist in a house near the
station. A sweet old widow called Mrs
Wiberforce rents rooms to the leader, Marcus, who poses as a Professor of music and
leader of a string quintet. The heist is to be planned under cover of ‘rehearsals’
with the old lady as an accessory to the crime, although she doesn’t know it.
Adding to the
comedy is a noisy parrot called General Gordon, an incompetent
and ill-assorted gang and Mrs Wiberforce's tea-drinking cronies, all keen to
hear the group’s rendering of Boccherini minuets - really a decoy
gramophone that disguises the gang’s plotting.
Michael Taylor’s
set is superb – a tumble-down, bomb-damaged house like a shambolic cuckoo
clock, all parts jiggling when a train clanks into Kings Cross.
Less successful
is the robbery, depicted on a board with moving lights to show the van
intercepted and the getaway cars. A trunk full of money at the station is to be
collected by Mrs Wilberforce, on behalf of her lodger. In the film with the
advantage of a high point-of-view shot as the professor watches from a bridge,
it’s much clearer.
Angela Thorne makes
a perfectly credible naval officer’s widow, but she’s wasted in a role cut
short because so many of the original film scenes are missing. A series of running
gags, such as the old lady constantly standing on the Professor’s long scarf
and a pivoting blackboard that always catches a gang-member a blow,
become tedious with repetition.
What the play
lacks most is the location shooting around the King’s Cross area. Much of the
film’s charm is derived from the police station, the back streets and corner
shops as well as the station itself. It’s as essential to the atmosphere as
the iconic station in another classic of British cinema, 'Brief Encounter'.
The film image of
Alec Guinness and Herbert Lom on a bridge dangling a body by the ankles as they
wait for trucks to pass underneath, the final drop swathed in steam, is unforgettable.
The robbery scene with head-scratching porter and out-of-order telephone box, plus the final
coup-de-grace delivered by a falling signal, are delights the stage version fails
to match. Someone I spoke to about the film remembered Frankie Howerd's cameo as an exasperated street stall owner.
As the actors
took their bows, my companion said the show was ‘delightfully silly’ and I more
or less agreed, until I read the director’s programme notes:
‘the Major, a
conman, is a caricature of Britain’s decadent and ineffectual ruling class,
One-Round is representative of the used, brutalised masses, Harry is the
worthless younger generation, Louis the dangerously unassimilated foreigner,
and Marcus embodies the collapse of moral and intellectual leadership.’
Given the widely diffused
irony and social comment in British films of the era – continued in TV series
like ‘Dad’s Army’ – it’s a shame the stage play didn’t bring this out.
