'Ave a Banana: A Knees Up Through Time and Space

Make sure you are on time for this show: you’ll get enough exercise during this hour-long musical romp without sprinting down Nicholson Street beforehand. If you do arrive, sweaty and out of breath, someone has had the genius idea of creating fans from fliers, so you can keep cool even as you whoop, sing, wave and get your knees up. Nana, Rosie, Cyril and Beryl lead a willing audience through a mixture of traditional music-hall numbers and re-workings of newer songs, teach us what to do in time-travel emergencies, and how to cure a dreadful time-travelling disease that is a bit like the bends. The audience barely need encouraging to join in, and even if they did the warm and cheeky smiles of Rosie (Amanda Gettrup) and Nana (Jools Voce) would have them immediately on side, singing their lungs out. Their patter between songs is a jolly cockney mixture of ‘good ole’s and ‘golly gee’s that draws the audience in, and there’s a good deal of comic ad-libbing. Seiriol Davies, the only man and a singular piano-player, is brilliant as musical backbone and straight(ish) man for the others to bounce off. He laughed so often that I was unable to tell if he was corpsing or if this was just part of his character. Whatever, the audience love him and laugh along. Beryl (Antonia Mellows) is a timid companion to the other larger than life characters. The audience joins in with the sing-songs from a song-book slideshow. Such classics as ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, ‘Roll out the Barrel’ and ‘It’s a Long way to Tipperary’ get a raucous outing - you can see why the venue have put them high above and away from the other shows! One of my particular favourites is a music-hall version of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ - who knew anarchists were so cuddly? Only one song falls slightly flat: Nana’s rendition of ‘Rehab’, lyrics re-imagined as ‘They tried to make me go to Hastings’ seems more contrived than the rest - 1066 seems a long way to go for a short song about bingo trauma. Underbling and Vow have created a show that is jolly good fun and a rollicking laugh - it will get you on your feet indulging in the kind of silliness you thought had been left behind in the good ole days. Those days are back!