Language of laughter
'The British performers decided to be reckless and perform the show to the English public in pidgin Spanish. It was crazy, but it worked'
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Your support makes all the difference.I read the other day that the old Hampstead Theatre was closing down, and somewhat to my surprise I was immediately swept up in hitherto forgotten memories of Alan Coren, and the smell of garlic, and a man walking around on his knees pretending to be Toulouse-Lautrec (not Alan Coren).
This is because the visit I can most clearly recall to the Hampstead Theatre took place more than 20 years ago, when Alan Coren and I were both working for Punch magazine. I had read reviews of a revue called El Coca Cola Grande, which was on at Hampstead, and had a sudden desire to go and see it. I told Alan I was thinking of going to see it, and he said he'd like to come as well, as it was just round the corner from him.
My wife gave me garlic steak for supper before I set off, and when I met Alan at the theatre he said, "My God, you stink of garlic – I'm not sitting anywhere near you," and thus it was that on the only occasion we went to the theatre together, we didn't really go together, but sat apart. (I think we may have met at the interval.) Fair enough. If we had sat together people might have thought that it was Alan who smelt of garlic, and word would have got round Hampstead that he had turned rancid, and that would never do.
But all that is irrelevant to the memory of the show itself, which was terrific. There were four or five performers doing a very loosely structured revue show, by which I mean they did a swift series of sketches one after the other, with no thematic link. What was breathtakingly odd about the show was that although the performers were all British, the show was entirely in Spanish.
Why? Well, for the rather endearing reason that the show had previously done a long tour in Spain, and as not a lot of Spaniards understood English, the Brits had gamely decided to perform it in Spanish. After a year or more on the road, they realised that they now had a very good show in Spanish, with no English version, so when they brought it home to London they couldn't be bothered to translate it into English, so they thought they would be reckless and present it to the English public in the original pidgin Spanish. It was a crazy idea but it worked, because the Spanish was quite basic and fairly comprehensible to anyone who had a smattering of Spanish, Italian or even Latin.
One sketch, I remember, involved a guest appearance by a black American blues guitarist. The compere bounced on and said something like: "Y ahora, directamente de New York, el fabuloso, el fantastico blues guitarist, Deaf Willy Johnson! Deaf Willy Johnson se llama 'deaf'" (pointing to his ears), "pero no e sordo, e ciego!" (pointing to his eyes), which I am sure you would all have understood meant that here to play for us was the great bluesman Deaf Willy Johnson, who was actually not deaf at all, but blind. Then to tumultuous applause the (white) man playing Deaf Willy Johnson was led on and stood ready to play. Unfortunately, being blind, he stood with his back to the audience. The compere rushed back on as he started singing, and turned him through 180 degrees to face us. "Deaf Willy Johnson" sang a couple of lines more, then took an impassioned step forward and fell off the stage into the audience with a tremendous crash, and was carried off inert.
It was so funny and in such poor taste that I nearly died laughing. The parody of Toulouse-Lautrec was also in fairly poor taste, but of the rest of the show I can remember nothing, just a warm feeling of being privileged to be there.
Who were those people? What happened to them? Did they ever perform in their native English again? Did any of them become stars? Did Alan Coren enjoy the evening? I have no idea. All I know is that two decades later, I am amazed to find I can remember one sketch almost word for word, and I wonder how and why it is that passing jokes can stick in the memory like that. And I also thank my lucky stars that I was around to enjoy groups like that before they were swept away by the plague of the lone stand-up comedian.
This journey down memory lane will be continued tomorrow. Please bring sandwiches and a raincoat
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