Dawn French, Vaudeville Theatre | reviews, news & interviews
Dawn French, Vaudeville Theatre
Dawn French, Vaudeville Theatre
Tears as well as laughter in a well-oiled stage memoir
When is a comedian not funny? Dawn French has spent so much of her life making audiences laugh that her debut as a one-woman performer requires some recalibration. The next-door smile is as big as ever, and the eagerness to be liked, so the early section – about the thieving march of time – looks and sounds like a stand-up routine that isn’t quite landing. Laughs are thin on the ground.
Only a celebrity with a massive deposit of public affection could make this work. In the same theatre earlier this year, Jim Dale told his life story in song and dance; while it was charming, Dale slightly paid for his long exile in New York with material that didn’t quite speak to a London audience. In telling her life story French can call on overwhelming familiarity, and old-fashioned schoolgirl popularity. Though her first husband is a background presence in her quest to be a mother, the word “Len” isn’t mentioned till deep into the second half. A photo-montage of the friends who supported her in divorce mainly consists of unnamed mega-celebrities.
This is not a show about them. A “Fatty” Saunders is mentioned a couple of times, but takes a back seat to the loving family in which French grew up. With a huge screen behind her on which to project photographs and cine-footage, this is a slideshow that just happens to be directed by Michael Grandage (whose other current West End headliner is Nicole Kidman). Introductions to her family afford moments of high comedy – her sinful grandmother is a treat, as is French miming the removal of a glass splinter from her mother’s private parts.
But while she mines indignities and embarrassments for comedy, there is seriousness too, even darkness. French walks the audience through her body parts - the more erogenous ones named Wood and Walters, or the Growler - in a section that confronts her relationship with her weight, and by extension with the press. (One journalist who attempted to find her adopted daughter’s birth mother is graphically slut-shamed.) French’s theme is time – the title Thirty Million Minutes alludes to her 58 years. More deeply than that it’s loss: of her womb, of her marriage, above all her idealised father who committed suicide when she was 19.
There’s a lot of familiar Frenchery too. Memories of favourite tunes have her dancing and lip-syncing, and there’s much talk of pants. What’s slightly missing from her word-perfect delivery is a sense of spontaneity. “Yes, that is something I wanted to say tonight,” she says, as if it’s just occurred to her. She’s 80 dates in and this affecting confessional is well oiled and carefully honed.
- Dawn French: Thirty Million Minutes at the Vaudeville Theatre until 6 January 2016
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