Music Hall Monster: The Insatiable Mr Fred Barnes – Wilton’s Music Hall

Music Hall Monster : The Insatiable Mr Fred Barnes continues at Wilton’s Music Hall until 12 May 2018.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

How the mighty fall. Fred Barnes was once the doyen of the music halls: born to a Birmingham butcher, by the 1920s he was among the elite of the varieties, strolling about London in the finest garb, an exotic marmoset monkey on his shoulder. But by the end of his life, he was singing for tips in Southend pubs, the monkey replaced by a chicken.

Barnes was also immodestly queer, some four decades before homosexuality would become decriminalised. His predilection for paying young servicemen for favours led to him being banned from the Royal Tournament.

It is not hard to see why Barnes’ story appeals so much to Christopher Green. As the creator of comic characters Tina C and Ida Barr among other performance pieces, Green’s body of work as a musical comedian and purveyor of tragicomedy can often feel like it belongs to a twisted 21st century take on the music hall.

And initially in his new work Music Hall Monster, it appears as if Green is mining Barnes’ back story to create a new stage character for himself: a preening old queen with many a story to tell and a song to sing, leading the audience in singalong versions of music hall standards and interspersing them with anecdotes and memories.

But there is more at work here. After an apparent crisis of confidence – one is not quite sure whether it is Barnes’, or Green’s – an early interval is called just 20 minutes after the show starts. But as the audience traipses out to the bar, Barnes is there, gaily singing along to a busking piano player and flirting with the punters.

The show that resumes for an uninterrupted Act II is very different. Green breaks character, talking with the audience about the influences and pressures of alcohol not only on Barnes’ personal and professional life, but on his own.

In a similar manner to his recent Radio 4 drama, How Success Ruined Me, in which Green and Roy Hudd discussed and deconstructed Barnes’ life, Music Hall Monster becomes about Green’s relationship with his predecessor, with the sort of self-destructive behaviours that have increased prevalence among gay men, and the toxicity of masculine expectations.

This deconstruction of the traditional biographical one-man show may not be to everyone’s tastes. We tend to prefer our portraits of damaged performers dressed up within tightly scripted performances that evoke the best of the characters even when they were at their worst (see all the varying versions of the Judy Garland story).

Fred Barnes’ story is not so very different from so many other performers, so a conventional show may not have stood out from the crowd. But by breaking down the fourth wall in his unique manner, Green takes that lack of difference and uses it to talk more generally about the impact of professional life, of gay life, on the human psyche.

Much as it is a post-modern take on the one-man show, though, there is still plenty of room for song. Accompanied by musical director John Orchard, Green combines traditional music hall numbers – from ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’ to ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ – with other numbers that deal more pointedly with the ups and downs in Barnes’ life.

It is testament to Green’s skill in constructing this work that one is never sure if they are music hall songs that fell out of favour, or new numbers created especially for Music Hall Monster. I, for one, do not intend to find out, for Green’s work is at its best when the lines of fiction and reality blur out of existence.

What is clear, though, is that Green knows how to turn a factual story set nearly 90 years in the past into a ruminative piece of cabaret that has much to say about the present. One hopes that, after this short run at Wilton’s, Fred Barnes comes back to life again in the future.

Scott Matthewman