Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

A big welcome to the West End’s newest theatre and an even bigger welcome to this transfer from Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic Theatre. It’s the extraordinary story of local man Neil Baldwin who captured the hearts of his community, and went on to do the same in the whole country through his autobiography and the TV film based on it. It’s stage adaptation is hugely successful, a life-affirming evening that opens Soho Place Theatre on a high.

Since Neil was born in 1946, he has had to contend with a multiplicity of labels. Today I think we would use aspergers, on the spectrum. The reality is that he is a man who loves life, has no inhibitions that limit his engagement with others, and has an infectious, adventurous boldness which has led him to live life to the full. He turns up at Keele University after school with no place or role, poses as a cleric, and is still there many decades later with an honorary degree and friendships spanning generations. He becomes a circus performer (now hosting a budgie retirement home in his) and mascot then kit man for his beloved Stoke City. He meets and befriends celebrities, politicians, royals, initially collecting autographs, eventually collecting a BEM from The Queen. I did say extraordinary.

The show is in-the-round with no set as such, though Neil’s bag for life proves to be a magical prop. Six actors play all roles, and there are many, all playing Neil at some point. Then there’s ‘the real Neil’ who joins from the audience to act as narrator and disrupter, and sometimes play himself too. It has an anarchic quality, at times feeling improvised, and a playfulness which is as infectious as the man himself. It doesn’t shy away from presenting the occasions when he’s being laughed at, but these don’t seem to last as everyone comes under his spell eventually. It’s loosely chronological, from conception to present. The cast are clearly having a ball, as we are, and that’s infectious too. Neil passed around the chocolates and I was tickled by Ken Dodd’s tickle stick (don’t ask!). The smile never left my face.

Neil wrote his biography with lifelong friend Malcolm Clarke and has adapted it for the stage with director Theresa Heskins. He was in the audience last night (the real real Neil) and I suspect that might be every night, as he was in rehearsals and in filming of the TV film. You are unlikely to find a more personal story told more personally, but its also immense fun and fully lives up to the title Marvellous. It’s unique and you should be sure to catch it.