Stan Laurel: Please Stand Up!

Published Monday 17 March 2008 at 10:15 by Liz Arratoon

If you’re a Laurel and Hardy fan, you’ll know much more about Stan Laurel than you’ll find out from Bob Kingdom’s show.

In an absolutely pointless first act, Kingdom appears disorientated. Whether he’s representing Stan or is just confused himself is uncertain. On a stage bare save for a bentwood chair, he sports a nightshirt and bedsocks and appears to have fallen from the silver screen. He presents Stan as a pathetic figure who is lost without his partner Oliver Hardy. He gibbers on about Ollie and moments from their films, but it’s incoherent stuff and he fluffs many of his lines.

After a 15-minute interval he’s back, now fully clothed, as an ageing Laurel, who sits at home dispensing comedy tips over the phone to, among others, Peter Sellers, Jerry Lewis and Dick Van Dyke. He describes his eight marriages to four different women, and confides that his partnership with Ollie didn’t go beyond their work. But so slight is Kingdom’s script that if you really want to get to grips with the great man, you’d be better off just Googling him.

As if by way of an excuse, Kingdom points out at the end that this is only the fifth time he’s performed it. But he wrote it, for heaven’s sake, so why did he struggle so to deliver his own material?

This is one of the least entertaining hours I have spent at the theatre and I regretfully advise not wasting your time or money on it.