Theatre I
Firbank on ice
Duncan Fallowell
Crispin Thomas, courtesy of the Nottingham Playhouse, is currently appearing in a one-man show at the Ritz, an impersonation of the early 20th century English novelist Ronald Firbank. It is the prettiest, most unusual evening in London. A ticket costs £10 but before you decide to go off to Bingo instead, you should know that this includes limitless free champagne in ice buckets, bunches of grapes and bowls of crystallised violets on one of the little pink and gilt tables at which you will sit with your favourite coryphee or catamite. The audience, a few dozens intimately filling a salon known as the Marie-Antoinette Room, is a diversion in its own right, a mixture of the merely curious and the downright twisted arranged as at a private soiree. Champagne and fruit was Firbank's staple diet, hence its presence here, although he was once seen to eat afoie gras sandwich in public.
The Ritz is so wonderful again, 75 years old this year, all its teeth recapped and a new tiara, one of the few places in London that doesn't have that queasy Titanic feeling. The champagne starts up at 6.30 p.m. under a golden ceiling and Mr Thomas appears at 7 in candystripe trousers, lemon waistcoat, and henna-red wig, the young Firbank shaking a perfumed fist at life.
Having heard that Mr Thomas was born in Trinidad, I was much looking forward to our first black Firbank. After all the author did publish in 1924 Prancing Nigger, the world's funniest black novel, only 50 pages long in the Collected Edition, in which he caught absolutely the intonations of black parlance, so the material is there. I've read somewhere that black actors are keen to muscle in on the West End. Why not kick off at the Ritz?
But it was not to be, Mr Thomas is white. Or, to be exact, tubercular pink, especiallY his fingernails. He darts out from behind a pink screen, sits on a pink sofa in front of the fireplace, composes his knees, and begins his recreation of English literature's most monstrously affected flower with all the garrulous enthusiasm of a chorus boy on cocaine.
He hasn't got Firbank's walk (a fidgeting undulation beginning in the toes and ending with a violent wrench of the head), nor his voice (low but with sharp swerves upward and unexpected halts), nor his giggle (which Augustus John said was the most sinister he'd heard, like a clock suddenly running down). In fact he seems to think that Ronald Firbank was LarrY Grayson with a private income, which is a mistake. Firbank was odder and tougher than that, a genuinely surreal figure, which one would hardly suspect from this rather oops-ducky performance.
What Mr Thomas does have is the words, Firbank's wit and terrific lightness of execution. The actor knows his sources. The script is scholarly, graceful, and very amusing, one and a half densely packed hours at breathless, wrist-slapping speed — too fast really. A certain expressiveness and human depth is lost. Every time I crunched a violet I missed a whole artery of meaning and a dozen nuances as well. A newcomer to the books must have found himself reeling in the welter of double-entendre and crossreference. Or is it just that I've been too long in the country and have become horribly, horribly slow? The only relief from this crackling assault comes with the interval — more champagne — during which the woman behind me, who was wearing a feathery hat and looked as though she'd divorced well several times, asked the man from Duckworth if the books were still in print. He almost gagged on a grape at being accosted by reality in this way, but replied, 'Never more so, funnily enough.' With the fervour of a missionary on the Dark Continent, a man with a green bow-tie leant out of the blue and said, 'Start with The Flower Beneath The Foot, a peculiar Ruritanian fantasy.' Then the second half cut them short, Mr Thomas in gunmetal grey and a panama, the mature Firbank, brilliant but obscure, slightly drunk, lungs diseased, posterity his only friend. This show will be popping 'up for years to come.
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