Review: Look up at the Stars, The Hen and Chickens Theatre

Look Up At The Stars’ big selling point is reuniting star Jessica Martin and writer Stephen Wyatt from the eighties Doctor Who story, The Greatest Show In The Galaxy, and, from overheard audience chatter in the bar afterwards, it’s clear that there are plenty of Who fans in. Between that and those stars in the title, one might easily assume this to be science fiction too, when really it’s more Sunset Boulevard if you trade down from Hollywood to Lime Grove.

A bittersweet love letter to the golden age of British cinema, the play follows Patricia Meadows (Martin), who in the postwar years made it from dancing in revues, through minor roles as maids and nuns, to the heights of a starring role in the Gainsborough melodrama that shares the play’s title. But then never any further, and certainly not to Hollywood, not like some of her old co-stars. Now it’s the eighties, and she prepares herself for a meeting with a prospective ghostwriter, working out what her memoirs should include, what has to be left out, and how much can be read between the lines. The ghostwriter is never seen, nor is any character other than Patricia, but Martin, having had her first big break as an impressionist, is perfectly capable of carrying the show by talking to herself, taking both parts as she re-enacts scenes from her career. Sometimes these are types: the theatrical grande dame who thought film beneath her; third husband ‘His Nibs,’ who liked a bit of rough trade on the side and is now in demand to play posh uncles in American films. Others are individuals, with her Hitchcock a particular treat, not to mention an impressive feat given the complete lack of any physical resemblance. Oddly, given Martin and Wyatt’s long connection to Doctor Who, the only one that doesn’t quite come off is when Patricia, her career well and truly on the slide, makes a small appearance on the show; Tom Baker is the only impersonation that feels off, not helped by dialogue which feels more like the modern show than the seventies version.

Really, though, the play’s great weakness is precisely that it is a play. Not in the sense of needing bells and whistles; Ian Nicholas’ shabby-genteel set catches Patricia’s reduced world well. Rather, the problem is that having invented Patricia, this perfectly plausible figure where at times you could swear you half-remembered seeing one of her films, the format obliges Wyatt to give her an arc, so that, having said she doesn’t want to talk about the husbands, of course she ultimately does, and a single great secret becomes almost the answer to why she’s ended up like this. I was left wishing Patricia and her reminiscences could instead be presented as sketches, or maybe better to say vignettes. Though she’s hilarious as often as she’s heartbreaking, this is a character who’d be perfectly suited for popping up every so often to share another behind-the-scenes morsel from a lost but lovingly reimagined age, rather than being shoehorned into one 75-minute arc. Though it could be argued, of course, that there’s a metafictional justification for structuring Patricia’s own story along the same melodramatic lines as her one big hit.

Written by: Stephen Wyatt

Directed by: Jason Moore

Produced by: Mirror & Mask Productions

Look up at the Stars runs at the Hen and Chickens Theatre until Sunday 27 September