Sue charms in romp through life of star

Sue devaney as Gracie Fields, with the rest of the cast

Our Gracie, Oldham Coliseum, to March 26

THOSE of us who largely missed the Gracie Fields phenomenon first time round generally see a woman who seemed to get by on native northern charm, cheek and a fondness for jolly or sentimental songs.

Truth is, the Rochdale star just worked darned hard and was the star turn in long-running West End revues for years, at a time when variety and music hall were king. When opportunities came, she charmed her way into them then let steely professionalism win the day.

Someone else working hard to play the great entertainer and national treasure is fellow Rochdalian Sue Devaney, star of Philip Goulding’s slightly over-presented and under-worked, variety hall-style biography of the star’s life, which posits a return to the Coliseum in around 1960 for a show to push her print autobiography.

It has to be said that without Sue, this would be a slightly rushed and dull affair, not so much a biography as a series of roughly-drawn vignettes of episodes in Fields’ life.

But with her - and Devaney’s own natural charm, which we know from previous appearances on TV and stage, is considerable - the show is a broad but entertaining romp, which overcomes the shallowness of the script and characterisations to make us warm greatly to its ever-smiling star.

We get everything from Fields’ birth - famously over a Rochdale chippy - to mill work, her rise as an entertainer, then stardom, movies and surviving cancer, not to mention wartime world fund-raising tours, moving to Hollywood, marrying three men and ending up living on Capri.

Through it all the diminutive Devaney, supported by six other actors, sings, jokes, ad-libs and breezes through the subject’s life with so much energy an audience could go home tired just watching her - after catching key songs “Sally” and “Sing as We Go” as a finale, naturally.

Characters in her life include Liberace, George Formby Jr and others great and small, all drawn sketchily but with sufficient detail for their weight in the scheme of things, by actress Liz Carney and actors Fine Time Fontayne, Matthew Ganley, Jonathan Markwood, Ben Stock and David Westbrook.

All play one or more instruments in Kevin Shaw’s world-premiere production too.

The comedy is rather too rough and occasionally lacking in purpose, but the audience lapped it up and went out happy. I suspect though, that much of the happiness derived from the work of today’s Rochdale star, not the one of a previous generation.