Death clearly becomes Penelope Keith.
Onstage, at least. The last time everyone's favourite cut-glass matriarch appeared at the King's Theatre she played a vicar's widow in Richard Everett's Entertaining Angels. This time Keith plays the widow of Sam, a tabloid newspaper editor in Keith Waterhouse's stage version of his comic novel.
Keith first played June Pepper in 1998, when Good Grief played the West End a year after the novel was published. Now, 14 years on and three years after his own passing, Waterhouse's play looks at times like he was penning an elegy for himself.
Keith is cast wonderfully against type as June, a hard-drinking northern lass we first meet at home following Sam's funeral.
Having promised him she'd keep a diary of her thoughts following his demise, June's scribblings become upstage asides. These become a form of therapy as June navigates her way between Pauline, the insecure daughter of Sam and his first wife; Sam's sleazy night editor, Eric; and The Suit, a gentleman scrounger June meets in the local pub.
Waterhouse was always a better writer than he was a dramatist, and Keith delivers June's monologues with a deadly dryness in Tom Littler's touring revival for the Theatre Royal, Bath. There are pithy observations on the ageing singleton's lot and how the bereaved can cling to memories.
Any poignancy relayed over a bundle of rediscovered letters, however, is over-ridden by the ending's sudden lurch into 1970s trousers-down farce.
Even with such inconsistencies, to hear Keith swear with such common or garden gusto was a refreshingly shocking treat.
HHH
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