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KIT & THE WIDOW'S JANUARY SALE
Kit Hesketh Harvey and Richard Sisson
Venue: Vaudeville 1994

   

Review

Revue closed in the London theatre with the coming of  Beyond the Fringe circa 1960. Indeed, it is now so dead that a whole generation of post-Fringe theatregoers merely takes the word as a misspelling for "review," and assumes it has something to do with criticism or retrospective reflection. But revue had a long and honourable tradition from the André Charlot shows of the early 1920s across 30 years to the wheelchair-and-piano-stool double-act of Flanders and Swann. It is that tradition, of the urbane singer-narrator and the reclusive pianist, that is revived at the Vaudeville by Kit and the Widow in their January Sale. Kit Hesketh-Harvey is the apparent leader of the duo, a sprightly, urbane satirist somewhere between Noël Coward and Tom Lehrer and ever-ready with such topical questions as: "What is white, plastic and dangerous to children?" (A Michael Jackson shopping bag.) The Widow is Richard Sissons, who started out a decade ago as the dumb piano-playing partner but has now, like all good stooges, come out to perform centre stage while his partner bitches from the wings. Their targets range from a demented Mrs. Thatcher lamenting her successor (Mad to Back the Boy) and the relics of her party: "Conservatives serving and unswervingly preserving,/Till there's nothing worth conserving to preserve." They also come up with a savage attack on Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and a suddenly heart-stopping, heartbreaking lament for the victims of AIDS, Light a Torch. Unfashionable, politically incorrect and wonderfully reactionary in most other respects, Kit and the Widow are a stylish start to 1994.