Stefan Bednarczyk – An Evening with Flanders and Swann at The Pheasantry

Stefan Bednarczyk: An Evening with Flanders and Swann at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★★★★★

There’s something ironic about someone called Bednarczyk performing the songs of such quintessentially British humorists as Flanders and Swann, that witty singer-songwriter duo of a bygone era unfettered by the requirement to be politically correct.

But Bednarczyk is as British as they come (albeit son of a Polish father) and specialises in very British musical theatre institutions, namely F&S and Noël Coward, who gets the Bednarczyk treatment at Zedel’s in the first week of March.

His mastery of Flanders and Swann’s predominantly gentle humour, often featuring animals, the ultra-clever ‘I’m a Gnu’ still a party piece, is backed up by sensational skills on piano and a well-chosen array of anecdotes.

Memories of seeing A Drop of a Hat as a teenager at the Fortune Theatre, their long-running West End revue in the late 1950s, Flanders wheelchair bound after childhood polio, come flooding back as the audience join in the unforgettable “Mud, mud, glorious mud” from ‘The Hippopotamus Song’.

That comes at the end of two hours of sheer bliss at a packed Pheasantry in a show originally commissioned by Flanders’ widow Claudia and first performed in 1995.

Bednarczyk crams two dozen songs into an evening that passed too quickly. Not all of them are funny, the beautiful ‘Youth of the Heart’, with words by Sydney Carter, a regular collaborator with Swann in the 1960s, is achingly sublime, as is ‘I Loved You Once’ which opens Bednarczyk’s second set on a note of nostalgia and regret.

Some of the songs are dated but he brings ‘In the Bath’ up to speed with references to Macron, May, Boris and Gove, while ‘The Gasman Cometh’ is as relevant today as it was when written. And still as amusing.

So too is a ditty Swann wrote with Joyce Grenfell, ‘Joyful Noise’, about three women members of a choral society who can’t sing.

‘The Slow Train’, about all the lovely stations closed by Dr Beeching’s notorious axe, and ‘Rain on the Plage’, when the foul French weather makes you wish you were back home, are darts that are still hitting home.

He acts the songs so well, but he’s been in films like Topsy-Turvy and Florence Foster Jenkins. He’s played Elgar and had a year’s run with Gene Wilder in Laughter on the 23rd Floor at the Queen’s. And been choirmaster and organist at St Patrick’s Church in Soho.

A man of huge versatility and charm, he is worth going a long way to see, if only for the magical ‘Misalliance’, a political allegory about the doomed love affair between the right-handed honeysuckle and the left-handed bindweed, and ‘The Sloth’, long one of my favourites, incredibly sweet and yawningly well done.

A very civilised evening, put together with great professionalism and love.

Jeremy Chapman