Looking back in good humour
Jonathan Cecil
SCRATCH AN ACTOR by Ned Sherrin Sinclair-Stevenson, £1 5.99, pp. 322 Ned Sherrin's entertaining comedy- thriller takes us back to 1953: to a London dulled by wartime austerity but with still a hint of a pre-war theatrical glamour, to a time when the King's Road was a village, when avocados were a curious novelty, when 'a man wearing jeans was usually your plumber' and adult homosexuality was still furtive and illegal.
. The story concerns an overweight-sound- mg musical version of An Ideal Husband written for coronation year by Sir Martyn Milman, a matinee idol whose professional life in shows with names like Wonderful Moonlight resembles Ivor Novello's but whose bisexual private life is nearer that of Michael Redgrave or Emlyn Williams.
Sir Martyn has a gimmick, a word rightly singled out as new in 1953 — though did directors then say 'Go for it'? His gimmick is to engage his whole family for the leading roles: his complacent wife, his sons, his daughter, his mother and long-lost reprobate father, even a lesbian ex-film partner.
The show's gestation period is amusingly described with sharply observed cameos the acerbic lady pianist, the supporting has- beens, the bewigged American choreogra- pher who turns out to be a rat as well as a pretentious boor.
The central plot is continually inter- spersed with flashbacks from the main characters' past lives. This can be some- what confusing and frustrating: Sherrin is such an accomplished portrayer of differ- ent periods and milieus — be they 1930s Hollywood, Edwardian theatres and sea voyages or a minor public school — that one wishes at times he would linger longer in the same place.
However, the bulk of the flashbacks con- cerns Sir Martyn's rogue father Max — a barnstorming ham long domiciled in Australia, whose feckless womanising drives his career swiftly downhill. He becomes briefly a miner, a cattle-farmer, a spiritualist's accomplice, a jailbird and finally a Sydney barfly. The suave Sherrin shows himself surpris- ingly adept at spinning this rough-hewn, ripping yarn of the outback, a sort of Boy's Own adventure with a Parental Guidance certificate. Especially clever is the hilarious evocation of a silent film called The Bondage of the Bush and throughout the saga of old Max I seemed to hear a cinema pit-pianist faintly pounding away. I was, however, a shade sceptical about the chances of the loveable scoundrel succeed- ing in genteel Shaftesbury Avenue: rather as if Robert Newton had been cast in Salad Days.
With the show's opening out of London in an even drabber Bristol, a serious thriller plot gets under way; not the usual backstage murder but a sinister homosexu- al frame-up engineered by a loathsome Patrick Hamiltonesque journalist. The arrest and trial, which could mean not just the show's ruin but that of Sir Martyn and his family, make a tense and disturbing cli- max.
At a time when Sixties permissiveness is blamed for everything — apparently it was all the fault of that unlikely double-act, Roy Jenkins and Mick Jagger — it is salu- tary to be reminded of the cruel, nonsensi- cal laws of preceding years. Ned Sherrin's indictment is all the more telling for com- ing at the end of such a light, good- humoured book.
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