THEATRE REVIEW: Vivian Stanshall’s Sir Henry at Rawlinson End at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre

Jun 24 2010 Liverpool Daily Post

WITH most of the country partaking in that typically English pastime of skipping work, drinking lager and watching their football team, it seems an apt night to celebrate the eccentricities of our nation in the company of the ultimate English eccentric, Vivian Stanshall.

Stanshall, who became best known as the leader of

the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, created the fictional characters of crumbling stately home Rawlinson End for a series of radio broadcasts thirty years ago.

And what characters they are! Head of this house of horrors is Sir Henry himself, a grotesque, gin-soaked, colonial throwback who keeps “a small but daunting prisoner of war camp” and proclaims at one point “if I had all the money I’d spent on drink...I’d spend it on drink.”

Then there’s Sir Henry’s ‘unusual’ brother, Hubert, a man wont to impersonate a sun dial while lying naked on the lawn and Sir Henry’s butler, the wonderfully named ‘Old Scrotum the Wrinkled Retainer’.

Portraying this ghoulish gallery throughout proceedings is one man tour de force, Mike Livesley, who not only dons Stanshall’s famous ginger beard but gives every resident of Rawlinson End a unique and hilarious voice.

Backing up the brilliant Livesley are a number of be-cobwebbed musicians, dressed in moth balled evening wear and playing a variety of unusual and esoteric instruments including ukulele, mandolin and washboard.

Their playful and delicate accompaniment sits perfectly with Livesely’s puns, double-entendres and clever wordplay with the leading man drifting effortlessly between the characters.

Stanshall sadly died in 1995 but this wonderful show is a more than fitting tribute to his eccentric genius.

Jamie Bowman