Richie Grice cuts a commanding but ultimately loveable figure as he sits before you. His love of comedy radiates outwards from the very time you meet him and he certainly knows his stuff and his ready laugh is easy and a joyous thing to hear whenever you mention something that tickles his own funny bone.
With rehearsals well under way for Bon Voyage at The Epstein Theatre, which stars the superb Lindzi Germain and the legendary Mickey Finn, I was able to catch ten precious minutes with the man who co-wrote the play with Paul Nicholson at The Garden at FACT and ask him his thoughts on the play and on comedy.
We’re here to talk about the recently departed or the soon to be recently departed; it should be an interesting show!
Richie: “If the audience have as much fun watching it as we have rehearsing it, then it going to be great! The depth of characters and back story is superb. The main thing that we tried to do at the beginning of it was to just have a good time, it’s just about fun and comedy but it’s comedy with a capital ‘C’ Someone said that with the amount of jokes in it, it was like watching Airplane! on stage. So it’s a case of if you miss a joke don’t worry there’ll be three along in a minute! If you went to see it on different nights, you’d probably see a different play because you’ve noticed something else. It’s packed with jokes and visual gags plus a big of slapstick.
The premise of it is that it’s just a funeral and initially it was just a gag at the end of the first half that was set up and basically I had that idea about 13 or 14 years ago and I had this written in as just a great gag. I’m not a great writer by any stretch of the imagination but if I can work with someone I can write with them. So what we have at the end of the first half is a visual gag a good few years ago and me and Paul Nicholson we collaborated about seven years ago and we had this idea about a funeral and all that but suddenly this gag we had 14 years ago fitted perfectly so we basically built the entire play around this joke.”
You have a great cast for the play and it must be wonderful working with a legend like Mickey Finn and what about your partner in crime and real life Donna not acting in a play of yours?
Richie: “He’s a wonderful man to work with, Donna’s not in it but she’s co-producing it, pulling the strings behind the scenes, kicking me up the arse when required! She’s just taking a big back seat there. She’s trying to convince me though that Maggie needs a sister!”
How long is the show on for at The Epstein Theatre?
Richie: “It’s only on for a week, what we’re doing is that we’re playing there for a week with the option to tour it as we’ve got a second joke so we should be all right! We’ll play anywhere, St. Helen’s, New Brighton, as and when the opportunity arises, we’ll put it out again, depending obviously on the audiences.”
Like If The Shoe Fits, do you see this play as a Liverpool comedy?
Richie: “My thoughts on that are if you put on a play in Liverpool, by Liverpool writers about Liverpool’s past then you get a Liverpool play! With If the Shoe Fits, you could take it anywhere and in the same respect with Bon Voyage, there’s a certain element that look down on ‘Scouse Comedy’ or populist comedy as people call it. So what you do is write a play and get everyone to perform it in Irish accents!”
Do you think comedy has moved forward since those seemingly innocent, but growling biting satire of the 1960s through to Airplane! – one of the finest comedies ever written, do you think there’s a new century of comedy available?
Richie: “I thought comedy was written better back then, it was more of a craft. People like Tony Hancock, Phil Silvers, that sort of stuff from the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was more of that variety theatre background as well. In the 1980’s though we had alternative comedy like Rik Mayall and Alexei Sayle coming through and the mainstream was like Mike Yarwood or Morecambe and Wise and that sort of thing. There’s no alternative comedy now as what would have been classed as alternative – the stand-ups or comics are more cerebral. There’s a particular show on B.B.C. 3 and that’s the worst half hour of comedy now I’ve seen. When you’re watching it and you see what they are getting away with on television, if you took the bad elements out of it, you could easily show it at 4.30pm on Sunday on I.T.V., there’s a place for it but I think, it’s brain-dead! I’d rather watch a cerebral and challenging performer, whose jokes you might not get! In Bon Voyage there is 42* jokes about being stiff, see I can be pseudo-intellectual as well! (laughs).
Thank you Richie, it goes without saying that you’re wished all the best luck with the production – Bon Voyage at The Epstein Theatre from Liverpool Sound and Vision.
*For those of you curious or downright nosey please refer to the incredible and indeed very cerebral Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by late philosopher and occasional writer of science fiction , Douglas Adams where the meaning of ‘42’ is revealed in all Its fourth dimensional meaningfulness!
Bon Voyage is on at the Epstein Theatre from Tuesday 10th till Saturday 14th September. Tickets are priced at £15 with concessions available at £12.50. Tuesday the 14th there is a special offer on for the preview which is priced at £10. To book tickets call the Box office on 0844 8884411, online at www.epsteinliverpool.co.uk or visit the Box office in person from 2pm to 6pm Monday to Saturday.
Ian D. Hall