PREVIEW
What: John Cleese and Eric Idle: Together Again at Last … for the Very First Time
When: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday at 8 p.m.
Where: McPherson Playhouse
Tickets: All shows sold out
It’s possible if Eric Idle enjoys Victoria as much as John Cleese seems to, they’ll both become regular visitors to our fair city.
Starting Sunday, these members of the legendary comedy troupe Monty Python play the McPherson Playhouse for three sold-out performances. Their show — a mix of scripted and improvised bits with video, reminiscing and old film footage — is Together Again at Last … For the Very First Time.
In 2013, Cleese, who is 76, travelled to Victoria for eight sold-out performances of his solo show Last Time to See Me Before I Die at the McPherson Playhouse. He returned in 2014 for a book-reading/talk at the University of Victoria’s Farquhar Auditorium.
Last year, Cleese and Idle, 73, performed Together Again at Last … For the Very First Time in the Eastern U.S. A tour in Australia and New Zealand followed. The Victoria dates launch a long tour extending to Vancouver, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, before concluding in New Orleans on Dec. 3.
Although Cleese had big successes with his comedy series Fawlty Towers and the film A Fish Called Wanda, he and Idle remain best known for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The seminal sketch-comedy series, which ran from 1969 to 1974, was notorious for its skewed post-’60s attitude and irreverent absurdism. A series of films followed: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983).
The troupe (including Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and the late Graham Chapman) were a well-educated bunch, having attended Oxford and Cambridge universities. Their scripts were typically peppered with references to writers and philosophers. The Philosopher’s Song, for example, took pokes at Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein and Shopenhauer.
Embracing a satirical style bordering on the anarchistic, Monty Python took aim at all aspects of British life. Bowler-hatted, brief-case-clutching civil servants were skewered in the Ministry of Silly Walks. Absurdism and whimsy loomed large. In the famous dead-parrot sketch, a devious pet store owner insists a Norwegian Blue parrot is not deceased, it’s merely “pining for the fjords.”
Idle is likely best known for Nudge Nudge, a skit in which he portrays a creepy would-be playboy who finds risqué double entendres in innocent remarks made by a pub patron. Idle’s writing reflected his special interest in wordplay. For instance, in another bit, one of his characters spoke in anagrams.
In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Cleese often used his height (he’s six-foot-five) to ridiculous advantage. His best-known character is one he reportedly didn’t particularly like, a goose-stepping maniac in the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch. Often he played authority figures who broke into furious rages, a device he repeated as easily-angered hotel-keeper Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers.
Although the promotion for Together Again at Last … For the Very First Time insists “no two shows will be quite the same,” reports of previous performances provide a flavour of what to expect.
One review makes note of a bookstore sketch, a fart joke from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, several songs featuring Idle on guitar (including a version of Eric the Half-a-Bee in Latin) and a sketch in which undertakers reveal “nasty truths” about what happens to bodies after death.
This year, Idle told Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald: “We mix it up … with a few sketches, fresh things that people haven’t seen a million times.”
