Compton Mackenzie (adapted Paul Godfrey) : Whisky Galore
Directed by Alasdair McCrone
Whisky Galore was published in 1946, and inspired by a real-life incident in 1941 when a Liverpool cargo ship ran aground off the island of Eriskay, transporting 28,000 cases of malt whisky. As the islanders' local supply of whisky had dried up due to the war and rationing, they were prompt to organise illicit salvage crews and helped themselves liberally to the liquid cargo before the Customs officers even got to the site of the wreck, much to the fury of the local customs officer, who took tremendous pains to attempt to get convictions for what he viewed as theft, but the islanders viewed as legitimate bounty. In the end, the officer went to the extreme of blowing up the cargo ship's hull in an attempt to sink her beyond the point where salvage was still possible, an act that reputedly scandalised the islanders.
What only became public knowledge years later, and casts a somewhat less amusing light on the incident, is that the S.S. Politician was also carrying a literal fortune in bank notes. Officially sanctioned salvage finally recovered around 70% of the sum, but that still left a great deal of money unaccounted for. However, Mackenzie would not have known this at the time. The original reports sparked in him one of the great literary farces of the last century, and that, in turn, engendered one of the most brilliant of the Ealing Comedies, in 1949, and for which Mackenzie wrote the script.
It's a text with a rich variety of characters and situations, a challenging concept to try to put on stage, but Paul Godfrey's approach is little short of truly virtuosic. In effect, we were seeing a play within a play - or more accurately, a radio play within a play. The staging is a BBC Radio sound-stage, obviously designed some time in the 30s, but the actual setting circa 1950, and with a plethora of peculiar props to remind us that radio drama, in those days, was performed live before a studio audience, complete with Foley effects created and synchronised on the spot. The studio audience therefore becomes us, the public. It's not so much breaking the fourth wall as absorbing the theatre audience into the fourth wall, and we were encouraged to participate in the creation of this radio play, with prompts for laughter, applause, cheers, groans, sighs and other crowd effects as required.
We are addressed directly by the radio director (who also happens to be the actual play's director), who presents to us the largely mute stage manager, George (also the actual deputy stage manager of the company) who will provide many of the sound effects, before introducing three actors - Miss Karen Wadrick (Helen McAlpine), Mr. Garth Hemlock (Barrie Hunter) and Mr. Findlay Easton-Crane (Darren Brownlie) - all Received Pronunciation, and nicely turned out in evening dress. Each one will take on half-a-dozen or more parts, as well as sharing the narration between them, in a rather dazzling display of vocal variety. At the same time, they are characters in their own right; Wadrick's something of a man-eater (as George finds out to his cost), Easton-Crane is as camp as a row of tents, while Hemlock fancies himself as a bit of a Flash Harry.
As a solution, it was, to say the least, ingenious. The first half, which introduces the islanders of Great and Little Todday (standing in for Barra and Eriskay), and ends with the discovery of the cargo of the wrecked ship (re-named by Mackenzie the S.S. Cabinet Minister), was positively riotous, with some particularly entertaining voice characterisation; the English Home Guard and Intelligence senior officers were as Home County as one might expect, but Lieutenant Boggust/Mr. Brown sounded almost exactly like Frank Spencer (Michael Crawford in Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, though perhaps not quite as gormless), while romantic lead Peggy Macroon reproduced the soft Highland lilt of Joan Greenwood (who played the part in the film), and Mrs. Odd sounded startlingly like Barbara Windsor, right down to the braying laugh.
There were also some extremely funny situations related to the studio aspect of the performance. For example, in one sequence, school-teacher George Campbell (voiced by Easton-Crane) returns home late after seeing his girlfriend, only to be caught out by his domineering and ultra-religious mother. In his attempt to return discreetly, he 'treads' on a creaking floorboard, and George duly obliges with a wicker panier to create the sound of the creak. The next time Campbell makes an attempt at a discreet return, Easton-Crane, getting a little carried away by his role, conspicuously 'steps over' the supposed creaking floorboard, to the annoyance of George who was preparing his wicker basket for the creak. So George, in retaliation, promptly and very noisily kicks over a bucket full of utensils. There was a lot of interplay of that sort between the actors and the studio manager which enlivened things considerably.
The second half of the play is a little weaker than the first, primarily because the most amusing section of the book at this point - the increasingly outrageous efforts the islanders go to, to conceal their loot from the frustrated Excise officer (Wadrick butching it up hilariously, with a thick Glasgow accent) - was pretty much skipped over in a piece of very short narration. I imagine the problem was that the events are too visual to translate successfully into this context. That left most of the second act primarily occupied with the engagement and marriage of Peggy to her English soldier boyfriend Fred Odd, which was agreeable enough, but the tension of him being English had been downplayed, and therefore the whole arrangement lacked dramatic spice.
What remained delightful about the set-up, from start to finish, was a sense of resourcefulness, as if we were really seeing improvised responses to unexpected incidents - the bucket mentioned earlier, or Wadrick showing up late because she's been cornering George somewhere off-stage, or Easton-Crane breaking into a jig during the engagement party, or all the actors having at some point or other to enact scenes with themselves when two of the characters they represent meet in a dialogue. It imparted a freshness, along with its waggishness, to the proceedings throughout the evening. The laughter came easily, the good humour was unforced, and the whole performance was thoroughly diverting.
[Next : 22nd November]
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