With his long, lugubrious face, good head of borrowed hair in the style of an Abyssinian guinea-pig, indignant pout, anguished frown and trademark high-rising Eider duck calls of, “Ooo-ooh!’ which got the Eider re-christened as the Frankie Howerd duck, Frankie Howerd was a tip-top-favourite comedian on radio, TV, stage and Carry On screen over long decades.
But though Francis set many millions merrily tittering, his own life was far from a barrel of laughs. Born in York in 1917, he grew up primarily in the Woolwich area, a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was still illegal and then was something very much kept quiet even when legalised, most especially in the world of celebrity. The comedian’s 40-year relationship with Dennis Heymer was a secret to be kept at all costs throughout his life.
Playing Dennis Heymer in this emotionally intense, sad but funny, two-man, one-act, highly acclaimed play is its writer Mark Farrelly (Sheffield-born and delighted to be back, he says, even if it’s not as a snooker player). Meanwhile, looking for all the world uncannily like the awkward, ungainly Frankie, with roving hair, wayward eye-brows, camel-face and all, is Simon Cartwright in suit with ill-fitting jacket.
Before the play opens, in dressing-gown and glasses with eye-patch, seventeen years on from Frankie’s death from a heart attack in 1992, Dennis sips brandy and surveys the audience, perched in a simple, spindle-legged fireside chair beside a leatherette pouffe (Eh? What? No, don’t! Don’t!) Over the mantle where an inadequate electric-bar fire stands is a fine portrait of Frankie Howerd OBE.
Roy Orbison and Dusty play and Abba urges us to take a chance before Dennis addresses those in the intimate, little auditorium, welcoming the audience in their role of the last visiting group to Wavering Down, Somerset, the couple’s home, in which Dennis, who was ostensibly Frankie’s chauffeur, P.A and factotum and nothing more, always hid when Frankie’s mum visited. Interacting with audience members/visitors, Dennis’s banter raises laughs, though his monologue a moment ago has made it clear he’s still full of unresolved anguish, anger and grief for his partner, a conflicted man never at ease with himself, who could never accept himself as a valid human being.
Then in walks Frankie – or the ghost of Frankie, a comedian whose unique style is all stumbles, bumbles, grumps and complaint as he mocks and chides the audience for finding innuendo and double entendre in everything he says, which, of course, he, poor soul, hadn’t even realised was there. No-ooo! Oh, what naughty titterers! To replicate precisely the spirit and sparkle of a Howerd performance is hardly possible but Cartwright comes close at times and is entertaining at all times, his body language particularly good.
In flashback scenes with sound effects and a little music (like Sealed With a Kiss and Can’t help falling in Love With You) the two enact snippets from the couples’ life – the bar where awkward, self-loathing, shy, embarrassed Frankie first met sommelier Dennis; wartime Borneo entertaining the troops; performing on radio’s Variety Bandbox or at Peter Cook’s Establishment club; visiting therapists and taking LSD. Being perverse, the show ends, of course, with… The Prologue. Well, you have to laugh, don’t you. Oh, please yourselves!
Simon Cartwright’s spot-lit, stand-up comedy routines are welcome comic relief as they were in Frankie’s life in spite of his stage fright, and they’re interspersed throughout to alternate with scenes of love, explicit moments of revelation or philosophical thinking and times of intense anger, resentment, recrimination and even hatred and violence between the two men. Humour, at least for a while, helped dampen the intolerable shame, insecurity, inhibition and eternal torment Howerd suffered even when in love – and having a frequent laugh cheers the audience up, too.
The two performers capture splendidly both the humour and the exhausting torment in these men’s lives, in which both struggled through this stormy relationship and were unfaithful. They have it all out in this play (Stop it!) as Dennis at last bids a fond farewell and attempts to lay Frankie’s ghost to rest. In spite of tough times, though, never could they contemplate not having one another (Now then! Behave yourselves!)
Eileen Caiger Gray
