BWW Reviews: BEING SELLERS, Waterloo East Theatre, November 4 2010

Peter Sellers was happiest when he was not being Sellers at all, but inhabiting other personas, whether through the verbal comedy and silly voices of the Goon Show, as the clowning Inspector Clouseau or as multiple characters in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove. At the new Waterloo East Theatre, David Boyle is "Being Sellers" by introducing all these characters in a set as claustrophobic as Sellers' life became.

Reflecting on his life from his hospital bed recovering from his penultimate heart attack, Carl Caulfield's script allows "Boyle being Sellers" to take us back to Sellers' childhood, disoriented by his parents' peripatetic lifestyle, travelling the country flogging the last few pounds out of vaudeville audiences, and how his Jewish heritage through his mother weaved uneasily through his disjointed schooldays. After the kind of lucky post-war break that saw Kenneth Williams and other national servicemen establish themselves as actor-performers, Sellers is soon a huge hit on pre-television age radio and a success in the movies. By now, Boyle's stage presence is matching Sellers' mental states, as the actor grabs at his chest with pain, rolls about on the floor in agonies and hides under the bed. Sellers' life was similarly tossed and turned as he acquired and disposed of wives in shouting matches (and worse) fuelled by envy and fantasy and sought comfort in a cavalcade of cars, private jets and swanky hotels. Of course, Sellers could never escape his real tormentor, because it lay within him and Boyle does a fine job of conveying a man who is never at ease. But Boyle also convinces in suggesting how Sellers brokered his talent and charisma into a stellar career in the cut-throat world of Sixties Hollywood in both commercial and art-house cinema.

After an hour or so of intense portraying of an intense man, Boyle / Sellers accepts his fate and joins us to sit quietly in the audience, the need to perform, to wrestle with his demons, to argue with children, wives, ex-wives, directors all gone, along with the life that flared for just 54 years.

 

Being Sellers is at the Waterloo East Theatre until 19 November when it transfers to New York.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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