| Excellent Performance |
| A life of Charles Hawtrey |
At the Torch |
| Oh, Hello , Chapter Cardiff , July 20, 2016 |
You meet a lot of interesting people in Chapter. I met Charles Hawtrey there last night. He mentioned he’d been in The Army Game. I ‘d been in the Army Game, the second series, Charlie had left by then but we were able to reminisce about other actors we had met there! So brilliantly successful is Jamie Rees’ recreation of the ‘Carry On’ star that you really do think it’s the real guy that’s talking to you.Hawtrey had a well-established and illustrious career as an actor well before his ‘Carry On’ days. He made his stage debut at the age of eleven. He trained at the Italia Conti Academy. Hawtrey started out as a child actor in silent films, he was England's leading boy soprano and worked alongside a positive who's who of the thirties and forties. He had directed films and produced West End shows, starred in three hit TV series and was a prolific radio actor for the BBC As he kept reminding us he’d worked with Will Hay, a major comic star of films in the thirties and forties, and he frequently boasted of the time he was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He was a complex character and Rees beautifully succeeds in capturing the complete man. Though very self-obsessed he was very fond of his mother. He took his name from the theatrical knight Sir Charles Hawtrey (mentor to Noel Coward) and encouraged people to think they were related. We catch up with him here in the mid-sixties at the height of his ‘Carry On’ where he had become a firm favourite of British audiences with his broad comedy and camp charm. In fact his ‘real life’ behaviour was more outrageous than on the screen. To the embarrassment of his few friends, despite male homosexuality being illegal up until 1967, he would parade the streets, eccentrically dressed, hail men as they passed him by. "He can sit in a bar and pick up sailors and have a wonderful time. I couldn't do it." A quote from fellow actor Kenneth Williams. Hawtrey was an alcoholic. Rees makes his entrance introducing us to the gin-filled, White’s lemonade bottle. A frequent smoker of woodbines that did for him in the end. Rees is very moving as he captures the sad closing moments of, this now lonely, man’s life. We get a good detailed picture of the man’s insecurity and vulnerability. Despite an enormously successful career, he is constantly searching for love. It’s almost become a cliché, the comedian, happy on the outside but very sad on the inside but again Rees brings this out perfectly. He is constantly arguing with the ‘Carry On’ producers that his name should have higher billing than “Sid bloody James” We enjoy Rees’ very funny account of love/hate relationship between Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams. Eventually these arguments result in him walking out on the series. He moved to a house in Deal, in Kent. There is a blue plaque on wall. Rees has given us the complete man from his vitality days of immense popularity to days now when he shuffles silently around the stage, old and alone. His last headline concerned his house catching fire on 5 August 1984. He had gone to bed with a much younger man and had left a cigarette burning on his sofa. Newspaper photographs from the time show a fireman carrying Hawtrey down a ladder to safety. On 24 October 1988 Hawtrey collapsed in the doorway of the Royal Hotel in Deal. He shattered his femur and was rushed by ambulance to the Buckland Hospital in Dover. He was discovered to be suffering from peripheral vascular disease, a condition of the arteries brought on by a lifetime of heavy smoking. He was told that to save his life his legs would have to be amputated. He refused the operation, allegedly saying that he preferred to die with his boots on. As at the beginning with his gin/lemonade bottle and now with this last characteristic remark Rees gives us the complete and complex Charles Hawtrey. |
Reviewed by: Michael Kelligan |
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