Ewan Wardrop in Formby at the Hackney Empire and on tour
Formby was performed at the Hackney Empire, London before continuing on tour until 2 November.
You can’t help but feel a little confused when Ewan Wardrop pops his head around the curtains and announces: “I know what you’re thinking… he looks nothing like him!” It’s true, Wardrop, perhaps more familiar to audiences as a dancer from Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures stable, looks nothing like the cheeky chappie from Wigan. In actual fact, the line is in keeping as at the opening of Formby, Wardrop is actually playing Arthur Askey introducing the great man for his BBC special in the late 1950s.
This tongue-in-cheek introduction is key to the structure of Wardrop’s one-man show paying homage to one of the highest paid entertainers of his generation. George Formby was a comedian loved and admired by music hall audiences, radio listeners and eventually film audiences around the world. The public couldn’t get enough of him, and Formby was the acceptable face of saucy seaside humour, less vulgar than Max Miller and his innocent sing-song delivery of songs littered with double-entendres was a winning formula.
Wardrop in fact plays all the key characters in the Formby story from his music hall star father, who died when he was still a teenager, to Beryl Ingham, Formby’s wife and by all accounts the driving force behind the success of his career. It was Ingham’s tenacity as a business manager that paved his way to national stardom as she ruthlessly negotiated all contracts.
Using a blend of physical theatre and simple narrative (directed by Ed Hughes), Wardrop’s is an undoubtedly theatrical tale brought to life with humour and invention. Whether he is a German officer on the front line, catching snippets of Formby entertaining the troops or clog dancing as Ingham in the halls, Wardrop’s talent and committment make Formby a hugely entertaining and insightful backstage story and the occasional breaking of the fourth wall only draws his audience in closer.
Musically, Wardrop’s mastery of the ukulele is fair but his grasp of Formby’s delivery is spot on without any garish attempt at an impersonation to muddy the waters. That he slips so readily in and out of different characters renders an impersonation pointless, so what Wardrop thankfully provides is less of a tribute act and more of a drama, the centre of which is Formby’s difficult relationship with his wife.
The song list features a selection of Formby’s greatest hits including an all too brief excerpt from ‘Mr Wu’, ‘My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’, the ubiquitous ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ and naturally ‘Leaning On A Lamp-post’, which is perhaps now better known to musical theatre enthusiasts as Bill Snibson’s 11 o’clock number from Me and My Girl.
In a questionable postscript to his show, Wardrop invites members of the audience with a ukulele to join him onstage to showcase their own talent. At the Hackney Empire, it is the geeky looking teenage Nico who nervously mounts the stage, only to provide a superlative performance that technically beats Wardrop hands-down. Taken in good part, it’s a perfect way to end a story that owes so much to natural talent.
Paul Vale
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