Picture: Lidia Crisafulli
Nanny was reviewed at the Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic. The tour continues until 28 February 2024.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Mary Poppins, this most certainly isn’t.
Indeed Nanny, the two-hander comedy with music given its world premiere at the Bristol Old Vic’s attractive studio theatre, could well bring blushes to the Cockney cheeks of Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-cleaning Bert, let alone Julie Andrews’ umbrella-toting childminder herself. For taking the kids they look after to ‘Stay and Play’ classes is only a beginning for the feisty nanny duo of Amy (played by Alana Ramsey) and Leanne (Lizzie Stables).
In their spare time, they are planning to moonlight at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, or anywhere else that will book them, as a musical comedy double act. As nannies, they may be pretty average, but the story penned by the two players would certainly raise a frown or two from Ofsted (or should it be Ofnanny?).
Themes worked into the narrative by the two players, co-writers alongside director Jenny Rainsford, range over friendship, rising above troubled times, falling out, making up, and in the end, remaining true to yourself. At the start, it focuses on largely unsuccessful attempts by the duo, perhaps rather fancying themselves in the French and Saunders mould, to get their act together, while keeping an eye on the neither-seen-nor-heard offstage children. The foibles of the latter bring more than a smile or two of recognition from mums and dads in the audience. There is more depth to come however, aided and abetted by their omnipresent mobile phones, as conflicts build over Amy’s hen night and Leanne moving away to nanny in New York.
All this is interspersed by a mix of songs ranging from praise for ‘The Perfect Mum’ and pleasure at a financial bonus that leaves Leanne ‘Quids In’, to the lament that ‘Everything I Do is a Failure’. The piano accompaniment, played from the edge of the stage by the show’s composer Matthew Floyd Jones, who doubles as musical director, has its amusing moments too. But although Ramsey and Stables work up a toe-tapping rhythm at times, over the hour-and-a-half length of the show the musical segments do come across as rather thin on the ground. Meanwhile, designer Cecilia Carey provides an ecclesiastical setting, reflecting the church where the childminding classes are taking place, although the singing twosome has to get by with a minimum of props.
Wiltshire-based Folio Theatre, now in its 10th year, combines the asset of being female-led with promoting new writing. It is taking Nanny westward from Bristol to the Plymouth Theatre Royal. My advice to Devonians? Lock up your shrinking violets.
Jeremy Brien
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