Review - Round The Horne... revisited at the Festival Theatre, Malvern

AN outstandingly outrageous evening of comedy.

Being a great fan of the 1960s cult radio show I was more than interested to see how it would be 40 years on as a stage show, and how the actors would compare against the original cast in sound and looks.

It was just as if Kenneth Horne and company had never been away. It was brilliant, with a script, or rather scripts, as funny now as they were then. Having been a top radio show it would have been performed live in front of an audience, much as we saw it on stage- with us as the audience.

This was surely the show the term 'double entendre' was coined for - especially when the camp duo Julian and Sandy were in conversation, or Charles and Fiona fleetingly met, and Horne's witty asides to the audience.

Stephen Critchlow is first rate as Kenneth Horne, and the rest of the team are certainly not in his sizeable shadow with Felicity Duncan, Stephen Matthews, David Rummell and Oliver Beamish bringing back happy memories of Betty Marsden, Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Douglas Smith, and Horne himself.

Memories too of happy Sunday afternoons with ears glued to the wireless.

I wonder if someone might have the courage to get today's team behind the microphone and revive the show on radio - especially as one of the original script writers, Brian Cooke, admits to having added some new material for the stage show.

If they do they've definitely got one listener for a start.

AW