Cavalcade

Two expressionless men in dustcoats cycle across the stage on a stretch tandem bike.  On the long bar between them, tiny, tiny men in top hats pedal too.  They disappear.  They return, but now they have reversed positions on the bike, and they go in the opposite direction.  They disappear.  Off-stage, there is a loud crash and then a heated argument begins.  The driver has smashed the bike into a wall that is not supposed to be there.  (A metaphor?)  Off-stage, sounds of a crowbar and a jackhammer.  The argument continues on stage.  It is philosophical: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is dragged into it. 

The show has begun as it will go on: philosophical and philogical argument spiced with puns, malapropisms, cod cultural references and slapstick.  The two men (Tom Considine and Peter Houghton) are simultaneously two stagehands, two clowns and two bickering, competitive thinkers.  They remind us of Vladimir and Estragon – only they are far more learned and pretentious.  They are a bit like the White Clown and Auguste – with Considine continuously correcting an only slightly abashed Houghton’s attempts to be clever.  (Houghton’s face is a study in itself.)

Cavalcade is something unique – and possibly impossible to describe.  It is simultaneously modern and old-fashioned.  It is vaudeville, it is Theatre of the Absurd.  In its way it is nostalgic and yet it is fresh.  It relies on our knowledge of the past but makes of it a topsy-turvy cabaret clown act that is constantly knowing, witty and engaging. 

On the wall behind the men there is a series of projections – similarly verbose and absurd – which tells us of the ‘subject’ of the show: it is the history of the ‘velocipede’ in a series of non-sensical chapters.  This history is what will hold the show together (if anything does), along with music by Eric Satie, played illustratively but emphatically by Peter Dumsday.  He wears a bowler hat on top of which is a tiny grand piano (his piano is merely an upright).  (Later, there will be two red toy pianos…)

The conceit is that the two stagehands are waiting for a cast of performers to show up, but they – private schoolchildren - have been delayed by a bus crash.  The stagehands are maliciously delighted by this but also trepidatious since they feel obliged to do the show themselves…

It seems nonsensical but every now and then a bitter shaft of satire breaks in.  Houghton is suddenly a beleaguered schoolmaster announcing a poetry competition.  Considine circles him on a bicycle, unstoppable, and his ‘poem’ consists of every contemporary political catchphrase, cliché, bromide, and evasion – all of which are projected on the wall.  The laughter at that point is not so hearty.  The very last scene, in which the bicycle is something else entirely, casts a sombre note back across all that smarty-pants one hundred and thirty years of culture and art.

The handbill for the show cites Satie, Dada and Wilde but those names are just three among many to which our stagehands refer.  (‘Is there a reference unturned?’ remarked The Companion.)  Heisenberg has already been mentioned.  A urinal is wheeled on.  It is somehow a prop for the show (not this show – the other show), but the stagehands maintain they do not understand it.  There is a bicycle wheel on a stand.  The pianist and later our stagehands all wear black bowlers.  The feel, as noted, is sometimes Beckett, sometimes Stoppard and sometimes others whom I missed.  Is the title itself a reference to Noël Coward’s 1931 play?  Probably not: it is a cavalcade of western culture since the 1890s, performed by two worker autodidacts - and it does all go terribly fast.

Playwright William Henderson (who on opening night could be seen gloomily prowling) clearly yearns for a certain past.  All this verbiage and ‘culture’ could be seen as showing off, but it doesn’t come off that way: it is too much fun and too good natured.  The precise delivery, movement and timing of Houghton and Considine lend it all a cohesion it could lack in less experienced, less expressive hands.  Some of it will go over people’s head.  Some of it went over mine.  It doesn’t matter.  Cavalcade is continuously amazingly inventive, intelligent and very entertaining.  You may not have seen a show like this; see this one.

Michael Brindley

Images: Ponch Hawkes.