Saucy Sixties seaside shenanigans

Grant Olding bought the New York cast of One Man, Two Guvnors a book on Brighton as a first-night gift.

The musician and former actor who penned the score for the stage hit which transferred to Broadway in 2012 had been struggling to explain what Brighton meant to Britons.

“A big part of the challenge was trying to explain to the Americans in the cast what Brighton was and what it means to us as a country and what it was in the 1960s.

“It was really interesting trying to find the American equivalent – I’m not quite sure we ever managed to pin down what the American equivalent would be.”

Coney Island, with its fairground and beaches only a few miles out of New York City, was the closest comparison.

“You want somewhere near the sea, somewhere people go to holiday, but also somewhere that people can escape to so they can’t be seen.”

Richard Bean rewrote Carlo Goldoni’s 1743 Commedia dell'arte play Servant Of Two Masters, called it One Man, Two Guvnors and transposed the action from Venice to Brighton. Olding, who was nominated for a Tony award and won the Drama Desk Award for best score during its New York run, says it was a clever move.

“The gangsters, the perennial British idea of a dirty weekend in 1960s is brilliant; that saucy postcard, end-of-the-pier, 1960s Ealing comedy thing, but in Brighton – it all fits so brilliantly with this world of low comedy slapstick and cross-dressing gangsters.”

Before and after the show and in between scenes the band created by Olding – The Craze – play new songs he wrote for the hit which opened at the National Theatre in London in 2011 with James Corden in the star role. When it came to explaining The Craze’s skiffle music to the Americans he struggled even more.

“We take it for granted – we know what it is. You point to a band such as Lonnie Donegan, songs such as My Old Man's A Dustman, Rock Island Line, and we know straight away. But the Americans had never heard of it.” One Man, Two Guvnors is not a musical but revolves around skiffle player Francis Henshall whose stock in trade – the washboard – is rendered surplus to requirements overnight when The Beatles arrive and his band decide they’d rather have a Ringo rattling out the rhythms.

Desperate to make ends meet, Henshall scores a job with a small-time East End criminal hiding out in Brighton called Roscoe Crabbe. Henshall gets another job for Stanley Stubbers, who is Roscoe’s sister Rachel’s ex-boyfriend. The only catch is Stanley actually murdered Roscoe and “Roscoe” is Rachel in disguise.

“I had to explain to the band how to make skiffle – what is essentially American R&B music and blues and country with the beginnings of beats and rock – feel British,” explains Olding, whose most recent scores include the soundtrack for Christmas movie Saving Santa, starring Martin Freeman and Joan Collins, and Great Britain at the National Theatre.

“Then I had to explain what an extraordinary thing skiffle is – it took this American music and anglicised it but you still sing it in a strange hybrid American accent.”

Olding had fewer problems when he put together a new skiffle band for the show’s third UK tour, which stops in Brighton for almost three weeks over the Christmas period.

He calls the four boys in the band “the most authentic” to date. And just like Olding, who was a child actor and went to stage school, all of its current members have backgrounds in acting but love music.

“They love this style of music, which is a happy coincidence. They really got into it. They play together when not doing these shows. They are always recording in each other’s bands.”

Even with protagonist Henshall’s musical talent being the washboard, One Man director Nicholas Hytner initially wanted Olding to compose an early Beatles-meets-variety-entertainer score.

“One of the first things he said to me was the The Beverley Sisters. He showed me footage of variety acts – a very fat man playing the xylophone, a girl tap-dancing on point while playing a banjo and a guy playing the hornchestra, these musical car horns we have in show.”

Olding walked away from the meeting wondering how he was going to make the suggestions all fit in one show with only four musicians. He decided the best idea was to pen some songs.

Around the same time, during a workshop, writer Richard Bean settled on the idea that One Man should be set in 1963 around the time skiffle died and The Beatles were born.

Olding wrote a few songs and proposed that they play songs inspired by the themes within the show but are not directly affected by the story.

“The songs are not integral to telling a story– they set up ideas – or they comment on the scene you have just seen, but they are about this Commedia dell'arte idea where if the scene if flagging then someone comes on and does a number or does a party trick. That was what happened with the old Italian play that One Man was based on.”

He penned My Old Man’s A Gannett, The Brighton Line, Bangers And Mash.

“Those were directly influenced by Lonnie Donegan. It was late period skiffle where the songs had become novelty.

“My Old Man’s A Gannett was about someone who was always ravenously hungry, which felt like it fitted with our story. It wasn’t James Corden singing about being hungry – it was another character singing about their father always been hungry.”

With all the skiffle songs about freight trains it seemed obvious to knock something together about the London to Brighton line. Along came The Brighton Line.

“It seemed like a really great idea where you could have a song with all of this saucy innuendo and be quite cheeky and at the same time it could be about a train, but really it is not about a train but about a woman.”

Hytner told Olding to keep writing and they’d get the songs in the show. Bean let Olding write all the lyrics.

“It was a dream brief,” he says. “I could write all these funny songs, which were great fun to write and I sat in the rehearsal room writing in the corner laughing lots at everything going on and making notes and writing these simple pop songs.”

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Locations

Brightonians will recognise the set.

The action takes place in and around The Cricketers Arms, which is loved by Francis Henshall (played in Brighton by Gavin Spokes).

He is short of money and famished with hunger. “The future – a pub with grub!” he jests.

The down-on-his-luck skiffle player has chanced upon two jobs in Brighton and he says it is perfect because, “It don’t matter if you get sacked, you’ve still got the other job”.

The police chase him through The Lanes, he cast rides on a carousel, whizzes through Brighton station and ends up in love on the pier.

Richard Bean

One Man, Two Guvnors writer Richard Bean honed his comedy writing in the town where he set the play.

He used to live in Brighton when he was a stand-up almost 30 years ago.

“I couldn’t afford to live in London so I used to stay at a friend’s flat in Varndean,” he says.

“There was only him there so he let me stay rent free. I would have to go to London for gigs as well and I remember missing the train back from Victoria a few times and I slept at the station.

“It was not pleasant. You’d have a cleaning truck going round all night – which was really selfish of them when someone was trying to sleep.”

The six-year career as a stand-up came to an end when he realised he wasn’t committed to the lifestyle.

“I was about 30-ish at the time, quite old for starting to do stand-up. Stewart Lee would be 23 years old, Harry Hill would be 23 years old, and I remember doing a gig and there were two 18-year-olds on the front row and one said, ‘do you fancy him?’ The other said, ‘no way, he is too old’.”

He had other options which he took up and this led him into writing plays.

“The gags have served me well as a playwright,” he says. “Other playwrights have other weapons: some are poets, some are sensationalists or have just got a bloody good eye for a plot. I tend to rely on three or four gags a page.”

One Man’s slapstick bears that out. Oliver Chris, who starred as Stanley Stubbers in the original production, called the show “an Eden of hilarity, 200 years of British comedy in two and a half hours.”

Speaking to The Guide back in 2011 as it opened at the National Theatre he said: “The best thing about this play is there is not one knowing laugh, not one middle-class, snooting, oh-ja-ja-ja-that-was-funny kind of laugh. People are laughing because they can’t help themselves.”

Bean says he’s looking forward to One Man opening at Brighton’s Theatre Royal in its spiritual home – especially as it comes in a bumper year for the Yorkshire-born writer who has had three world premieres in 2014 including Pitcairn at Chichester Festival Theatre.

“Theatre Royal is a lovely theatre. It will be a really good place to see it because it is quite small. We took In The Club there about seven or eight years ago but that had sex, phonies and the EU – this is very different beast.”