Were he alive today, Larry Grayson might be considered a gem if not quite a national treasure.
Having been at first rejected by 1950s television audiences as not the sort that middle England wanted to see on its screens, a couple of decades later, the nation took Grayson to its heart and he got arguably the biggest gig, following in the footsteps of Bruce Forsyth hosting the BBC’s The Generation Game.
The ones to demur—very publicly—were The Gay Liberation Front, who disapprovingly called out his camp presentation of gay men as disreputable and would have Grayson out himself (something he never did). It was not the Front’s finest hour.
This, along with the death of his soulmate, schoolfriend Tom, is a rare darker moment in a biographical play about Grayson which now graces the stage at the underrated Bridge House Theatre.
Writer Tim Connery intercuts Grayson’s life story with passages of warmly funny standup making it an irresistibly entertaining show whether or not your age or predilictions means you saw Grayson during the years he fronted light entertainment’s most popular shows.
To those of younger generations, Grayson is from another world. Born a hundred years ago, he was fostered from birth, not discovering until later that a frequent family visitor was in fact his unmarried mother. In the end, events saw to it that it was ‘foster sister’ Fan who raised him and to whom he remained devoted throughout his life. He left school at 14 to work and was doing sketches wearing dresses in Midlands clubs several decades before drag acts became ubiquitous, performing in regional theatres and venues doing standup before he found success in his early 50s.
Almost nothing is known about Grayson’s private life; perhaps he didn’t have one in the conventional sense, remaining steadfast to Tom, who died in World War II, long before Grayson became a celebrity figure and three decades before homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK. Connery’s play by force then is largely a professional biography once the childhood period is past, Grayson’s life delivered in linear form, and nothing wrong with that except perhaps too many episodes starting, “in 19…”.
Luke Adamson gives an outstanding performance as Grayson, embodying the good-natured way he would deliver the sharpest of asides, continuing with his routine after riding out a wave of laughter from the audience with one of his puckered-lip pouts or signature gestures. On the page, some of the comedy might seem dated, but Adamson oozes the affection Grayson had for the cast of characters he so comically mocked. They were the ordinary people around whom he grew up, from Slack Alice at the coal merchants to lucky Lil who had a man in to fiddle with her Hotpoint.
If you are one of those who remembers Grayson as just a camp comic of his day, then this show may make you reconsider—it is hard not to admire a person who worked relentlessly honing a talent to become the star the sickly boy Grayson predicted for himself.