Julie McNicholls( Missy Ranting, Fender’s employer), Alex Gilbey (The New clerk, Fenders replacement )
The secure thread of friendship runs through this gently comic play.
It is post-war London. Fender (Harry Durnall) works for Ranting & Co where he has clerked for 43 years. His job involves making lists of clothing while he sits in a threadbare coat with holes that let the wind howl through to his old bones. His offer to buy one of their warm sheepskins with money docked from his wages is met with a snorting sneer from Missy Ranting (Julie McNicholls). In despair, he turns to his old friend Morry (Sandy Spence), a bespoke tailor with ‘a needle like Paganini’, and asks him the impossible task of repairing the coat.
Morry compromises by offering to make him a bespoke coat at a special price but Fender dies before he can benefit from the comforting, draught free garment. A disturbed ghost returns to Morry’s workshop. But the bargain bespoke coat, wrapped and ready in brown paper, is not enough for him. He will only be assuaged by the revenge of getting Ranting’s sheepskin on his back. Singing a brandy fuelled version of Hava Nagila, the two old pals nick the coat and Fender returns to the other world a happy man having carried out a quiet revenge in pursuit of justice.
A treadle sewing machine with cutting table, along with an office table furnish the bare brick walled set that serves as warehouse and tailor’s shop. The pleasing sounds of hurdy-gurdy music mark the play’s scenes, like silver pins marking a garment’s seam.
Morry, dressed in a kippah, a black pin-jabbed waistcoat, and with the steel expanding armbands of the time on his collarless shirt sleeves, sports a tape measure round his neck as he mourns the loss of his old friend Fender. Fender’s holey coat is a moth eaten tragedy on his back as he makes a meal from a soup free bagel – a fitting metaphor for the poverty of the time for some. A maudlin version of the 1930s German song Oh mein Papa from Morry is loaded with poignancy.
This is a refreshing expression of the warmth of male friendship sensitively portrayed by Spence and Durnall. Alex Gilbey who plays the Charles Atlas wannabe that is Fender’s replacement, is like a young Leonard Rossiter. Julie McNicholls plays the boss with hard boiled primness, secure in her own stylish garb but mindless to the stark human suffering of her staff.
Wolf Mankowitz’s 1952 version of Gogol’s original and now classic tale The Overcoat is an altogether gentler take on the bitter humiliations and frustrations felt by Akakii Akakievich. The Bespoke Overcoat was later made in to a short film starring Alfie Bass and David Kossof and its moral message in any form is as strong today as ever.
This shiny wee button of a play is worth fastening on to.
12 – 17 August, 3pm
£8.50 (£7)