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A Fanny Full of Soap
By Nichola McAuliffe
Oberon Books
£15.99
288 pages
Dateline: 24th May, 2007
Nichola McAuliffe is an experienced actress, probably best known to
TV audiences for her part in Surgical Spirit. In 2004, she was
cast as Edwina, the star of an ill-fated vanity project called Murderous
Instincts, which was billed as a "salsa-comedy-murder-mystery".
She became so angered by the ineptitude of the production that, even
before opening night, she went into print with her damning attack on
everything to do with this amateurish disaster.
Her greatest criticisms were reserved for a would-be Broadway impresario,
the mega-cigar-smoking Manny Fox, a talentless, septuagenarian control-freak
who produced the show and yearned to direct it.
His position was secured as husband of the writer, Firestone Tyre Sales'
Cinda Fox. The show certainly ended up in cinders after regular conflagrations
during which most of the cast and creative crew were sacked at least
once and nobody was fully paid. This joyous show played at the Savoy
Theatre for a full five nights before a lack of funding, poor reputation
and negative reviews put it out of its misery.
Miss McAuliffe's latest novel, A Fanny Full of Soap, is about
a former soap star Eleanor Woodwarde who, having discovered her husband's
shameless adultery, returns to the boards to head up a cast in a salsa
musical, The Merchant of Venezuela.
There she encounters passion with her director; battles with Izzy Duck
a septuagenarian cigar-smoking producer who would like to direct; and
struggles with a script written by his talentless, heiress wife Viola.
As they always say in the small print at the beginning of novels (including
this one) and the end of films, this is a work of fiction and all characters,
names and incidents are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to the
name character or history of any person is coincidental and unintentional.
The first section is eminently skippable, as Eleanor takes an immense
time to discover that her husband David is sleeping with Phyllida, The
Country Wife.
It only gets going after our heroine makes the momentous decision to
join the company of a prospective West End musical, unforgettably described
by one of many sacked characters as ""a cack-handed vanity
project with absolutely nothing to recommend it".
Once we get into rehearsals, the tone becomes over-the-top bitchy,
as leading actresses fight each other both physically and verbally,
the husband-and-wife creative team constantly bicker and make up, and
there are more entrances, exits and (theatrical) deaths than even Shakespeare
could have dreamed up.
Having taken a long time to get going, this light comic novel becomes
a real page-turner as its show-stopping star gets embroiled in the behind-the-scenes
battles and, angered by the ruthlessness of her back-stabbing colleagues,
becomes hardened and, as a result, gets a life.
The amazing thing is that so much of what has been written is based
on documented fact. It would have been wonderful to be a fly on the
wall during the machinations that eventually, but so briefly, offered
the West End Murderous Instincts.
For those that steered well clear of this stage equivalent of a disaster
movie, the intermittently hilarious and occasionally touching, but always
vitriolic A Fanny Full of Soap is not a bad substitute. It also
provides an insight into a side of the theatre that is rarely commemorated
in print.
Philip Fisher
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