Few comic cuts in cartoon caper

“TONY AND TWIZZLE, THE GLORY YEARS”
(Lowry Quays)

I JUST don’t get it. Lip Service — Manchester-based writers and performers Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding — have been around for years and are currently in the middle of their final year of Arts Council funding.

The notion is that the couple are so successful — which they are, with a firm coterie of fans all over the country and critical accolades — that they will have no trouble carrying on as a commercial theatre company. Indeed they already plan a comedy based on Doris Day for next year, and I know of people who adore their shows and will not hear a word said against them.

How this adoration has come about I have no clue. I do not recall any of their shows that were not built on a foundation of nice but hamfistedly written ideas, on mediocre staging, and on distinctly below-average performance — particularly from Maggie Fox, who as a writer may be imaginative and funny, but is not much of an actress.

In this she plays Anthony Chalmers, while Ryding — far better on stage — is Isobel “Twizzle” Trilling, the whole thing a spoof of a Z-list celebrity couple as the pair present one of those interminable, self-obsessed autobiographical shows that tour to minor towns with even more minor theatres.

On the posters the two look creepily like Eric Idle and Vanessa Feltz. Unfortunately, in live performance they display the glamour of Idle and the talent of Feltz.

The idea of spoofing nonentities is itself suspect in that these people are usually already caricatures of genuine stars with real talent.

Fox and Ryding take this even further, with parodies of some of the couple’s famous shows, from the “northern” kitchen-sink movie that brought them together, “Wednesday Night and Thursday Morning”, through deranged versions of “Upstairs Downstairs”, “All Creatures Great and Small”, “Dallas” and others.

The scale of invention and slickness of thought occasionally reaches clever heights, filling in personal histories, for instance, by taking on the stories of genuine celebrity scandals and public mistakes and slyly making them their characters’ own flaws.

But much of the time the joke level is pedestrian, the sort of thing French and Saunders have also got away with for years, covered up by lots of face-pulling for the fans.

Director Mark Chatterton seems to achieve little in getting what is a cartoon to work as anything more than a cartoon.