Tipping the Hat (A Play, a Pie and a Pint), Traverse

Flanders and Swann were a musical comedy duo who achieved considerable fame in the fifties and sixties, writing and performing comic songs of silliness and satire.
 Written by John Bett, this homage to the pair features a few of their songs, anecdotes that illustrate the nature of their partnership, and tries to convey a sense of the humour they specialised in.  John Jack and Gordon Cree play themselves.  They might be dressed the same as F&S, sing the songs and crack the jokes, but they do so as admirers and not impersonators.  So their Scottish accents feel entirely appropriate in a production that makes the odd nod to the location of the performance.

Kudos to the set designers.  In the bare space that is Traverse 2, and despite keeping things minimalist, they've done a great job of recreating the sumptuousness of the kind of Victorian regional theatres the pair frequently played.  Jack and Cree fit naturally into the roles, both good singers, Cree clearly an excellent pianist, and they bring just the right amounts of daftness, audience interaction and comic timing to give some feel for what a live F&S show might have been like.  Both make the most of the available laughs, and revel in the smart wordplay that was a hallmark of Flanders' lyrics.

I can remember Flanders and Swann on the radio when I was a child, and that they often made me laugh.  But even then they felt like something from the past, out of step with the direction of travel, and that remains a problem for this production.  The humour might be clever, but it's so dated in style, so gentile, that it's hard to find it as funny now as people did back then.  I'd liked to have seen a more adventurous form to the storytelling, giving us more sense of their place in the history of English satire and greater range of the sociopolitical issues they raised in their work.  There was an excellent section of the Beeching rail cuts of the early sixties, and the F&S response, and the show needed more of that, and earlier on, for the first twenty minutes or so dragged a bit.

It is still enjoyable, the performances are first class, and there are things to be learned about the duo and their times.  But not enough for me to make a wholehearted recommendation, and I have to wonder what anyone who'd never heard of F&S before made of the show.  If the script was tilted more towards fact than whimsy this could have been an excellent show.