Hair of the Dog
HAIR OF THE DOG
a random revue
February, 1985 at the Old Profanity Showboat, Bristol
The Playwrights Company presents
CAST
Adeen Fogle
Aidan Hamilton
Alwyne Taylor
John Telfer
WRITTEN BY
The Company
and Len Colbourne, Ros Corfe, Jack Duff, Greg Evans, Brian Miller, Robin Seavill,
John Telfer, Carl Turville
POSTER AND PROGRAMME
Robin Seavill
DIRECTED BY
Peter Southcott
PS
One of the most interesting things about this show was that it was put on in a ship. The Thekla had once been a cargo vessel, converted in the eighties into a performance venue called the Old Profanity Showboat and moored in Bristol Docks. (It was also apparently at the same time the home of former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band member Viv Stanshall and his family, though I never got to meet any of them.)
I wrote loads for this, most of which can be found in the Revues section (I see I even had the gall to recycle French With Rips from A Room With a Revue, the first Oxford show I had ever written for ten years before), but my favourite was the Nicholas Nickleby spoof What the Dickens! which neatly provided a strong first act closer. It was just the sort of thing a group of professional actors got off on, and I think they had as much fun performing it as the audience did watching. I have no false modesty about this sketch. When something works, it works, and you need to be able to recognise it, otherwise how are you ever going to diagnose what the problem is when something doesn’t? At the end of the first act of Tom Stoppard’s early masterpiece Travesties (1974), the main character Henry Carr asks James Joyce, “And what did you do in the Great War?” “I wrote Ulysses,” Joyce replies. “What did you do?” That would be my response to anyone who asked me to justify my time on this earth: “Name one worthwhile thing you ever did while you were alive.” “I once wrote a five-minute sketch that made people laugh for six minutes.” All right, it’s not Ulysses, but it’s not nothing.