The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel – Wilton’s Music Hall and Touring

Jerone Marsh-Reid and Amalia Vitale in The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel at Wilton’s Music Hall and Touring. Picture: Manuel Harlan

The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel was reviewed at Wilton’s Music Hall, London and then tours until 28 March 2020.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This is a Told By An Idiot production with the Theatre Royal, Plymouth in conjunction with Royal & Derngate, Northampton and Unity Theatre, Liverpool. A commission by the London International Festival of Mime, strictly speaking it is a mime show, but not as we know it. The subject is the life and times of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, two of this country’s most famous funny men. Having played the music halls at the turn of the 20th century (although not the wonderful Wilton’s itself which had closed by the time Chaplin and Laurel were on stage), in 1910 they joined Fred Karno’s famous troupe of music hall artists and set sail for the USA.

The two comics shared a cabin on board ship and then spent two years touring North America, with Stan playing understudy to Charlie. They subsequently went their separate ways, Stan teaming up with Oliver Hardy on stage and in films, while Charlie developed his famous Tramp character for the movies, becoming the most famous man in the world. Both comics were huge global successes but, while Laurel never stopped talking about Chaplin, Charlie never mentioned Stan in his autobiography.

The Told By An Idiot company under writer-director Paul Hunter have taken Irene Cotton’s original idea for a story about the two comic actors and fashioned the results into a ‘silent movie’ but one played out live on stage. Although not strictly chronological the story unfolds as a series of incidents or sketches in the style of the two stars’ own work, remembering that they both found fame in silent cinema.

At various times during the show we get details of the birth of Charlie and the death of Oliver Hardy, Fred Karno’s transatlantic journey with his two protégés, portraits of Chaplin’s parents, his mother being sectioned in an asylum and his father a drunken music hall singer, in a tale told with immense imagination, with a completely wordless script except for the songs, but provided with intertitles as was the norm with silent films.

The whole thing is a riot of hilarious stage business and slapstick comedy, much falling about and pratfalls plus plenty of humorous but dangerous-looking violence redolent of silent comedies in which nobody really seemed to get hurt. Rather than calling it ‘mime’ as such, it is more like a cartoon film in Tom and Jerry style where, having been knocked senseless, everybody gets up and carries on. There is one exception which calls for the disposal of a body wrapped up in a blanket, an act that is expertly but riotously done.

The cast of just four play out their routines with consummate ease, skill and agility. It doesn’t seem to matter that actress Amalia Vitale as Charlie is a woman because she captures the essence of Chaplin in the look, the walk and the athleticism of the great man. And, anyway, if you study Charlie’s demeanour, it always had a touch of feminine grace and daintiness about it.

Jerone Marsh-Reid as Stan (and a Bell Boy, a Doctor and a Landlord too) imbues every personation with great elan, while Nick Haverson, a natural comic I would say, storms the piece with his Fred Karno, Charlie’s Dad and Oliver Hardy among the other roles he inhabits. He is amazingly moving playing the death of Hardy with a pillow up his shirt. Finally, Sara Alexander does quality work as Charlie’s Mother and also doubles as the resident pianist, providing the essential musical accompaniment for the show – well, all silent pictures had piano accompaniment. – and the music by Zoe Rahman contributes to the essential nostalgia for the silent picture era.

Acknowledgements must also be made to the contributions by the physical comedy consultant Jos Houben and the dance choreography of Nuna Sandy. It is 90 minutes of absolute non-stop movement on designer Ioana Curelea’s splendid multi-level stage that appears to be a severely hazardous construction which in rehearsals must have taken an age to master.

It was a pleasure seeing the show at Wilton’s Music Hall, as it’s an atmospheric building with a checkered history that lived through the silent film era and eventually managed to survive. If Charlie and Stan never played there, it’s interesting that Richard Attenborough shot part of his Chaplin film in this famous and now resurrected building.

Michael Darvell

* The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel continues at the Minerva in Chichester before a UK tour to Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Scarborough, Northampton and Exeter.