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Preview by Paul Nelson
If you want to see an explosion on the stage, from two of the most unlikely characters, I can do more than recommend La Goulue, currently at the Rosemary Branch Theatre pub in Islington, and about to explode on the stage of the Wimbledon Studio Theatre.
Picture, if you will, a shy and retiring slightly bespectacled man who plays
the piano beautifully, and a baglady. I won't repeat that.
That is what you get in one of the most exciting evenings in the theatre that
I have seen for many a year.
The baglady is none other than the celebrated dancer of the Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, immortalised by impressionist painters but here reduced to a shambling existence begging for the odd glass if not a bottle of brandy.
Her reminiscences of her heyday are remarkable. They are funny and at the same time pathetic.
Memories of the painter Toulouse Lautrec, (sexually he resembled a teapot) and the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt (she accepted my pet lion and had a pegleg, maybe the lion got too friendly), are just a tempting tiny section of this wonderfully entertaining evening.
The shy pianist is Stuart Barr. He is merely brilliant. The baglady, La Goulue herself, is a genuine atomic bomb controlled under the guise of Valda Aviks, a Latvian displaced person who has a very respectable history of shows and performances in the West End.
I could run out of superlatives describing this phenomenon. The evening is
so exciting, has such a lot of adrenalin running with it, that to miss it
would be a crime.
Apart from the expertise of Barr on the piano, you have the supreme artistry
of the great Valda Aviks. I haven't see an actress to shout about for years,
so look here, I'm SHOUTING!
Don't miss this. People will be talking about it for years.
La Goulue, written and directed by Judith Paris. With Valda Aviks (La Goulue),
and Stuart Barr (The Pianist). English Lyrics by Anthony Cable. Lighting Design
Finnuala McNulty.
Currently at The Rosemary Branch Theatre, Shepperton Road, Islington.
Wimbledon Studio Theatre January 10 to January 12 at 7.30pm.
