Not to be confused with a later television adaptation, Stan, Neil Brand's 2004 radio play about Stan Laurel, has just been broadcast again on Radio 4 Extra and will be available on BBC iPlayer for the next thirty days. Stan, the radio drama, is very good indeed and a natural for the medium; the TV version doesn't simply add visuals but has been considerably reworked: we see scenes from the pair's past rather than their simply being recounted by the elderly Stan. Nothing wrong with that, but the intimacy of the radio play, and in particular that feeling of luck and privilege in being magically present, unseen, at the last meeting of these two great clowns is diluted.
Hardy is an audible presence in the radio play, though mostly wordless; in effect we are Hardy, listening to Stan trying to battle through the fog of his friend's illness. It is up close and personal, and even though it's my experience that radio producers often counsel that radio drama can be epic at considerably less expense than TV or film, Stan, directed by Ned Chaillet, is a reminder that it also does intimate pretty darned well.
I don't know whether or not Brand, or others involved, made the right decisions for television. Like they used to say on quiz shows, the radio play is yours, Mr Brand, we can't take it away from you. So why not treat the TV opportunity as something different? (Is perhaps the way it went. Or didn't; I really have no idea.) And since the studio-bound, shot-on-video drama seemed to go the way of all technology by the early 90s I'm not sure whether a general audience (as opposed to fans) would tolerate two men in a room talking for forty five minutes.So packaging it as a kind of mini-biopic might have been a contributory factor in the TV film's being made; I don't know. But I do know that the radio version is the one to which I'll be returning - and not because of those jarring brahn eyes (I ask yer!) lodged in the sockets of the telly actor playing the young Stan.
The real Laurel's eyes were blue, and the difference is obvious in every black and white photo of the pair (of performers or eyes; whatever). To add insult to injury, the BBC website's page with information about the radio play is illustrated wth an image from the TV version. Jeff Pope's recentish biopic, Stan and Ollie, might not have been accurate in every detail but at least Steve Coogan's eyes, whether through the use of contact lenses or digital trickery, appeared to be the correct colour.
There is also a one-man stage play with a similar premise, ... And This Is My Friend Mr Laurel, written by Gail Louw for Jeffrey Holland of sitcom fame; he has now been performing it, on and off, for at least ten years, as I saw it at the Jermyn Street Theatre in 2016. It's an ideal venue for what is an intimate experience, starkly staged, with a chair and the frame of a bed as the only props (plus, of course, the inevitable hat).
As with Brand's radio play this has the elderly Laurel talking to an unresponsive Hardy, represented onstage by that simple metal bed frame. I don't feel inclined to compare the two plays, however, because this undoubtedly has its own power. Holland, when shifting into Stan's comic persona, summoning up some of the pair's famously stupid exchanges (he does Hardy as well), really does convey a sense of him, but it's to Gail Louw's credit that this hour is not a Greatest Hits with a flimsy storyline connecting the gags. It is, in fact, an essentially melancholy spectacle: a man being prompted (by the illness of his partner) to look back on the failures and dissatisfactions in his life, puzzled or saddened by some of them, angry at others, but brimming, above all, with obvious affection for the man who has shared his professional life for so long.
As with some other shows, like the TV dramatisation of Morecambe and Wise's early days, I'm slightly hampered in assessing this by knowing too much. There was a Q&A in the second half and I was astonished to discover that just about everything in Laurel and Hardy's offstage, or off-camera, story seemed to come as news to everyone else - with the honorable exception of Roy Hudd (of course), who happened to be in last night's audience. I mean, it's not as if those two main John McCabe books have just come out, is it, let alone the many other tomes which followed. (Read Charles Barr if you're in a hurry; his modest monograph gives you everything you really need.)
Roy Hudd prompted Holland to recount the wonderful story about Hardy clambering up that stairs to Ray Alan's dressing room at the end of a UK tour to get the vent's autograph (a tale which happens to be included in this book) ... though the payoff, not mentioned last night though almost certainly known to Messers Hudd and Holland, is that the face of Alan's most famous dummy, Lord Charles, was subsequently based on that of Stan Laurel.
For those coming to the show without a huge amount of knowledge about the pair's private lives, then, there will be an additional dimension of surprise, but for me it was more than enough to have such a vivid evocation of Laurel in later life, facing the possibility that everything, good and bad, is now behind him. The ending is uncompromising, which felt right.
Neil Brand's radio play, in effect placing us in bed with Hardy, gives us a sense of intimacy unique to that medium, but the bonus of being able to see Holland's facial expressions is a reminder of the power of theatre. As would seem to be
the case from the letters Laurel wrote to so many correspondents in his
later years Holland strives to be sunny side up, so that the sadness and
occasional outburst of anger or pain seem to be torn from him when he is
caught up in his thoughts, momentarily unaware of Hardy, and then just
as quickly brushed off, just as one imagines the real life Stan would
not solicit pity.
There is a bit of "But why am I telling you all this?" when
recounting the pair's history, but there's no doubt that Laurel speaking
to Hardy, as opposed to an interviewer, is a more effective choice. That colleague who disliked the TV adaptation of Neil Brand's Stan felt that our actually seeing the bedridden Hardy changed
and coarsened the play, but that use of a bed frame avoids that risk in ... And This Is My Friend Mr Laurel; our imagination - thanks to Gail Louw's script and
Jeffrey Holland's performance - does the rest. And when, at the end of his Jermyn Street Theatre performance,
Holland motioned for the audience to applaud the bed which
represented Hardy it felt fitting.
Link:
BBC iPlayer page for the Neil Brand play
Related posts:
New radio play about Stan Laurel
Hard Boiled Eggs and Nuts (review of Stan Laurel play on BBC Radio 4)
Stan and Ollie (new Laurel and Hardy film biopic by Jeff Pope)
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