12 May – 7 Jun
Greenwich Playhouse,
189 Greenwich High Road, SE10 8JA.
£12 (£10), Tue-Sat at 8pm, Sun at 4pm – Booking Info
Imagine a camp Dad’s Army (ok, a more camp Dad’s Army) with heavy influences from Monty Python, Blackadder, and every WW2 film you’ve ever seen: this is Sparrow Heights.
Devised by actor Martin Hearn and his company, Sparrow Heights is an unashamed romp, with enough innuendo to outdo Barbara Windsor and more puns than your Dad. The story follows four British soldiers, who embark on a highly disorganised mission to rescue the enigmatic General George Geoffrey Bungle from the hands of the Nazis, after they’ve captured him to steal a recipe for chocolate sausage pie. Told you it was camp.
The ludicrous premise is followed through with maximum farce and a bombardment of toilet humour that is rather painful at first, but once you’re into the rhetoric of Sparrow Heights it begins to feel much more comfortable as the pace gathers towards the close.
Well-credited director Alastair Green asks a lot of his actors, as each takes on about four different roles and the scarcity of props also necessitates a good deal of miming. The intimacy of this small scale affair also means you can see every bead of sweat and spit that these guys put into it: 10/10 for sheer effort, and for learning 70 minutes of dialogue that could fill 3 hours if spoke at a normal pace. Adam De Ville leads the way in all respects with a fantastic rugger-bugger precursor in his English General, closely followed by Carole Carpenter who holds her own as the only gal and deserves credit for sheer volume: after this you’ll be looking at Bette Midler in a whole new way. Chris Courtenay and Martin Hearn round things off as the camp and the stupid respectively, and fulfil their roles adequately, though with a little less commitment than the other two and a bit more sweat.
Amidst the farce, this play is really a critique of the way in which popular culture has devised such polarised stereotypes of WW2 personnel: alcoholic, cowardly Generals, dumb privates and barbaric, deviant Germans. It pokes fun at the film genre it has borrowed, with double crossing spies hidden by ‘impeccable’ foreign accents, slow motion death scenes, and the feeling that it really was all jolly good fun, despite the dastardly danger. I suspect there’s a serious message in here about our collective tendency to glamourise, to the point of ridicule, horrific events in our history. But it’s only with hindsight that Sparrow Heights evokes this kind of thinking – surrounded by talk of chocolate sausage pie, it’s difficult to think in such real terms.