John Cleese live – review

Corn Exchange, Cambridge Dividing 19 years of marriage by $20m alimony, John Cleese’s former wife made $3,650 each day she spent as Mrs C. The divorce has driven Cleese to undertake his first ever UK standup tour. Alyce Faye Eichelberger (for it was she) gets it in the neck for a tart 10 minutes, before spiky cedes to cosy and our host settles into rose-tinted reminiscence of his TV heyday. It’s more This Is Your Life than standup, but Cleese proves a better tour guide than he was a hotelier, leading us along the promenade of wartime Weston-super-Mare and up to the giddy heights of 1960s and 70s entertainment. The funnies here are more likely to be found on grainy old film footage, of Cleese and Marty Feldman on their 1960s sketch show, say, than live onstage. Cleese traces his ascent from stifling lower middle-class, where the apex of ambition was avoidance of embarrassment, to Broadway, where he ended up part of a hit Footlights revue. We see slides of him, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor onstage, screen-grabs of a scene he performed with Peter Sellers, and clips of the Frost Report, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, with well-oiled anecdotes attached. Ex-wife-bashing aside, there’s no hint of the black humour Cleese claims as his trademark. His drily funny commentary can’t hide a serious-mindedness, and he encourages, rather than undercuts, the reverence in which his once-anarchic comedies are now held. But stateliness is redeemed by Cleese’s affection for his co-stars of yesteryear, and his gratitude that opportunity came his way. It’s a nostalgic evening rather than an especially comical one. While Cleese may be now relatively short on dollars, in showbiz memories he’s still a rich man. Rating: 3/5 Comedy Brian Logan guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.