Gilded Balloon Teviot – Wee Room
Aug 5-30
(16.40)
What a cockle-warming tale Richard Ashcroft Revived My Libido is, given to us by a wonderfully sincere comedian who knows she’s funny & clearly enjoys sharing that fact with us. Also onstage is her daughter, Ripley (after the Alien films’ strong-woman icon-goddess) & together they make a cracking, squably French & Saunders-style double act, bouncing beautifully off one another while adding another layer of warmth to an already deeply personal show. The parentally-induced trauma dump exorcised by vegetables was just one classic moment in their co-artistic alchemy. Catch them together while you can, before Mel retires for good to some Caribbean island or something, flush with the profits of a return to comedy which appears to have blossom’d in perfect tandem with the glorious renaissance of her libido.
“Go back to your room – no your position at the tech-desk!”
Mel Hudson certainly hasn’t suddenly materialised at the Fringe because Richard Ashcroft flicked some mysterious switch in her middle-aged libido. She’s been knocking around British comedy for decades, memorably appearing opposite Steve Coogan as the gloriously French Nina Vanier in Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, turning up as Lauren’s French teacher in The Catherine Tate Show, & forming half of The Hudson and Pepperdine Show with Vicki Pepperdine on Radio 4. She’s also developed a substantial parallel career in audio, including narrating Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time novels. After stepping away from comedy for a lengthy spell, Hudson has returned to the stage with what is remarkably her debut solo show at 60: Richard Ashcroft Revived My Libido. So this isn’t some ingénue nervously testing the Fringe waters; it’s an experienced comic performer re-entering the arena with several decades of life, motherhood, celibacy, menopause & showbusiness packed into the ammunition belt.
Mel’s venue is the Wee Room at Gilded Balloon Teviot—a good space, actually, despite the diminutive sound of its name. There’s something reassuringly old-school Fringe about Teviot itself, that great Gothic pile riddled with staircases, bars, corridors & performance spaces like some comedy-addled Hogwarts. The Wee Room sits comfortably within the madness: intimate enough for Mel to eyeball us & share the more personal corners of her tale, but spacious enough that nobody feels they’ve accidentally wander’d into her living room. Which, given the subject of Richard Ashcroft Revived My Libido, is probably for the best.
As for Richard Ashcroft—I’m a fan of The Verve, the first three albums anyway. I sometimes play them back-to-back like some glorious triptych of rock ‘n’ roll genius. Therefore, when the show began to the opening strains of “A New Decade”, the first track off A Northern Soul, I knew immediately that Mel wasn’t messing about. This wasn’t some conveniently borrowed celebrity name slapped onto a Fringe title—the woman knows her Verve & she wasn’t messing about.
Mel comes onto stage wearing a too tight red dress, but flaunting her womanhood in ways a lot of 60 years-olds wouldn’t dare – no pashmina or button-fronted cardigans for Mel, if she wants to flaunt her figure, go for it girl – you got this! Watching Mel was great – you know, there’s a funny bone in all of us, sometimes a comedian will clang it with a very clever joke, or sometimes a silly one, but Mel got the most genuine ‘Damo’ laughs out of me this Fringe.
The catalyst for the show was a Richard Ashcroft gig at the Crystal Palace Park Bowl, during which Mel promptly fell in love with him. Her cat had recently died, & leaving that pseudo-maternal mental state, she was suddenly free to be, well, her true self – a sex-kitten siren.
Any rock & roll concert, by the way, play’d on the same hallow’d ground where Burnley FC won the FA Cup in 1914 is always going to possess certain magical qualities, such was the supernatural beauty of Bert Freeman’s winning goal—and some of that magic appears to have rubb’d off on Mel, for Richard Ashcroft Revived My Libido has proven a rather glorious consequence.
From a taste of her first stirrings of libido — The Osmonds, no less — thro’ a succession of what she describes as her “biblical boyfriends,” Mel takes us skipping across the decades – from deflowering to goddess chakra – celebrating a lifetime of sensuality, attraction & sexual energy. What could easily have become a catalogue of conquests instead feels like something warmer: a woman looking back across the various incarnations of herself, before discovering, rather unexpectedly in a south London park, that desire hadn’t disappear’d at all—it had merely been waiting for Richard Ashcroft to start singing.
Alas, with Ashcroft being married, but with her libido now raging, Mel turns to internet dating, revealing to us some of the funnier profiles she came across before hitting us with a wonderfully feel-good ending to take home into the night—smiling, of course, with a happy heart cuddl’d into tranquillity by Mel’s warm, mischievous & life-affirming comedy.
& I’ve never heard anybody say the Belgian city-name ‘Bruges’ funnier than Mel!
Damo
