Flanders And Swann In Variety At Its Best

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30578, 22 October 1964, Page 22

Flanders And Swann In Variety At Its Best

“At the Drop of a Hat” opened a four-night season at the Theatre Royal last night. All those who have enjoyed, on record, the Michael and Donfoolery of Flanders and Swann will want to know whether they have anything to add in person. They have. They add their personalities, and play them for all they are worth —which is saying something. Imagine James Robertson Justice doing a song-and-dance act in a wheel-chair, and you have Michael Flanders. Imagine Laurel without Hardy, and you have Donald Swann. They exploit the incongruity of their appearance, attitudes, and techniques to produce a tremendous sense of the ridiculous.

Incongruity is, in fact, the essence of their art: two middle-aged men in immaculate dinner suits singing undergraduate songs for adults; two sensitive and refined gentlemen who create an informal drawing-room atmosphere into which they drop little crackers of perceptive nonsense—witty, urbane, and ever-so-infectiously jolly. The songs are mostly familiar, although the embellishments are many and worth waiting for—the stage offers a freedom not afforded by the record company. And the visual effects revitalise even the best known of the songs: Swann playing the piano with

his crispness and control while at the same time acting and reacting; Flanders being a gnu and an Edwardian roue; and together making a passable London omnibus or a tall ship worth going down to the sea again to see. But the songs are only a beginning. Flanders spends most of the show talking to the audience with the engaging insouciance of a skilled raconteur, and has them laughing almost continuously at his unlikely stories, his barbed quips, and studied asides. Swann shows hts versatility as an Irish tenor, a Greek folk singer, and a deep student of Russian.

“At the Drop of a Hat” is, then, variety at its best, variety in both senses of the word—in material and attitude, and in style. They are entertainers who jab, disturb, soften, warm, and tickle their audience at will. Nothing is beneath them (some of the puns are almost unforgiveably obvious) but nothing, not even the complexities of French horns, French politics, and Mangere airport is beyond them. They were entirely justified in preparing their encores. Christchurch will look forward to yet more redroppings from their hats. —P.R.S.