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Twinkle, Little Star

Published Wednesday 23 January 2008 at 13:20 by Pat Ashworth

This real-time monologue from a panto dame making his final appearance as Widow Twankey is the perfect vehicle for Kenneth Alan Taylor. A master of the craft, his own Dame performances used to border on the anarchic and he is returning to play Twankey once more in 2008.

It is a riveting piece, played out here on a quirky comic strip set that suggests all the wonderful silliness of panto. Harold Thropp is the wrong side of 60. He is assigned to a basement dressing-room, upstaged by a talentless soap star and overlooked and underestimated by a shallow theatre management that bulldozes the panto tradition and can’t even spell. His revenge is sweet, in the darkest and most triumphant of climaxes.

Taylor is hypnotic to watch as he potters around his dressing room, performing practised pre-show rituals like unpacking his kettle, scattering his face powder, unwrapping the tools of his trade from folded cloth, pulling on his glossy tights. His account of Thropp’s life as a gay man in the era of police raids on public toilets is outrageous but the parallel tragedy of lost love is aching.

The audience is fiercely on his side, drawn into despising the third-rate show as much as he does and loving this dogged, arch, comic trouper. Distant sounds of piano and chorus rehearsing and fragments of voices and memories flutter in and out. When Tropp finally dons the Twankey wig, he is utterly transformed, walking like a dame and speaking like a dame. It is brilliant.

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