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Wilton’s Music Hall, LondonA transatlantic voyage in 1910, with the silent stars onboard, is the basis of Told By An Idiot’s beguiling comedy
Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel shared a boat from the UK to New York in 1910, as part of Fred Karno’s music hall troupe. Stan later understudied for Charlie – before they went their separate, and separately legendary, ways. Is that a “strange tale”? Not really – it’s just a scrap of biography, a fleeting association about which little is known. But in this silent comedy for the London international mime festival, Told By An Idiot mine it for beguiling oddity, as Chaplin, Laurel and Karno shuttle and pratfall around a transatlantic liner and episodes from their past and future vault into view like salmon from the sea.
The effect is less tale, more short stories. It is assembled with minimal rhyme and reason, but with the follow-its-nose logic (and illogic) to which the company’s fans – myself included – are well accustomed. Director Paul Hunter valued “fiction over fact [and] fantasy over reality”, the programme tells us – which explains the central sequence, in which Chaplin accidentally murders his underling with a frying pan and (after the obligatory manhandling-a-corpse slapstick sequence) hurls the hapless Lancastrian overboard. Continue reading...