Jos Slovick, Scott McFarlan, Hannah Howie, Pamela Wernham, Alison Tennant, Sarah Moss and Patrick Rowe in There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London
There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 28 June.
Star rating: 4 stars ★ ★ ★ ★
A nostalgic, funny but quite hard-hitting evening among the warm theatrical Gatehouse community sees a long-held idea of Ovation’s director John Plews brought gutsily to life by close friend and Daily Express columnist Jennifer Selway in this ‘play with music’ premiere.
We’re in the west of Scotland in 1960, the day Sergeant Elvis Presley pays his one and only visit to these islands, changing planes at Prestwick on his way home from military service in Germany.
Greeting him are hundreds of screaming girls, including fan club organiser Jeannie (a superb performance from MTA graduate Pamela Wernham) and the other members of the Kilmarnock branch, local lasses Zoe (Hannah Howie) and Lizzie (Alison Tennant), and American teenager Ruth (Sarah Moss) who knows every bit of Elvis trivia and performs his hits beautifully on guitar.
Meanwhile, virginal Jeannie disappears for 20 minutes hoping for a personal audience with ‘the King’ and winds up best friend Zoe by concocting a story about having sex with him in the loo. Or is it a wind-up?
Around the same time and anxious to trap her reporter boyfriend Rob (a permanently frazzled Scott McFarlan) into a more permanent relationship, she gets herself pregnant after insisting that her first sexual experience in the back of a car be the real non-Durex deal.
While Jeannie had been ‘saving’ herself , feckless Rob was having his needs looked after by her forward best friend Zoe, a relationship that, unknown to Jeannie, goes on for 20 years through her marriage to the dreamer who sacrifices his Fleet Street ambitions to do “the right thing”.
Act I ends appropriately with Elvis’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ pumping out of one of those Dansette record players that are now collectors’ items.
Fast forward to 1981 (the year Kirsty MacColl wrote the title song) and Rob and Jeannie have separated. The innocent days of kissing an Elvis poster on the bedroom wall have long gone for the now 40-year-old Jeannie. Life is now real, life is earnest.
All that time Zoe has wanted Rob for herself, and is desperate to believe Vince, the product of that first youthful liaison who is running the local chippie while planning a career as an Elvis impersonator, is really Presley’s son.
The friendship between Jeannie and Zoe has, not surprisingly, totally soured and, in a climax that sees Jeannie belting out ‘It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want to’ and Zoe doing justice to the MacColl hit, Vince (LSMT graduate Adam Scott Pringle) dons the white Elvis suit Rob and Zoe have given him at his 21st birthday party, for his ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ Presley turn.
MD Jos Slovick doubles as an American GI/backing musician and Gareth O’Connor and Patrick Rowe are the other US elements in a lively, keen-to-impress cast in which the Scottish parts are all played by Scots, meaning there are no dodgy accents flying around.
Leah Sams’ set is nicely in period, sound designer Jon Raper works wonders with the flashing lights of a landing plane, and there’s some very tidy impromptu jiving when the cast enlist audience members to join them on-stage.
Director Plews says the concept for the show started at a pub quiz when he was the only one who knew the answer to ‘When did Elvis set foot in the UK?’. The idea lay dormant for a while until he brought it up to Selway who put it into dramatic form. And the rest, as they say, is history.
This isn’t great theatre, there’s nothing new musically (what’s wrong with the old if it’s the King himself?) but I absolutely loved it, was absorbed by it from Jeannie’s first entrance to the final Elvis medley, and can see it going down a treat at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Bravo!
Jeremy Chapman
www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com
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