'Privates on Parade' Donmar Warehouse

If you close your eyes and think of actor Roger Allam, the image of an exquisitely powdered drag queen hardly springs or even struts to mind. But as Captain Terri Dennis, lending light of the Song and Dance Unit, South East Asia, during the anti-Communist 'emergency' of the late 1940s, Allam emerges as a beefy figure with painted eyes and a lemon countenance. Whether doing his Marlene Dietrich number, upholstered in silk as Vera Lynn or hamming it up as an improbable Carmen Miranda, he is consistently beguiling: comic, unsentimental, at times hinting at a vulnerability beneath the gay bravado, at others rolling doubles entendres around his mouth like an old lady with a rogue peppermint.

This is Peter Nichols' 1977 play-with-songs drawing on the author's experiences alongside Kenneth Williams and Stanley Baxter with Combined Services Entertainment in Malaya. Part memory play, part satirical fable, it uses a pastiche variety show format to question the myopia of the imperialist mindset and the end-of-Empire policy that risked the lives of young soldiers for dubious commercial motives. Centrestage is a young recruit (James McAvoy) who learns his first lesson in betrayal just as Malcolm Sinclair's sublimely old-maidish Major leads the 'Queens Own' into the guerrilla- infested jungle.

You could say that the piece is stronger (in incident than plot - a central chunk of Act One, involving a corrupt sergeant, fizzles out into nothing. But the campery between the men, their

fears, their reminiscences of home are all beautifully caught. And in Michael Grandage's spirited production, it's Denis King's period pastiche songs - here a Noël Coward parody, there a Flanagan and Allen-style number about gay love - that prove most watchable. Indira Varma is excellent as a Eurasian femme fatale; Hugh Sachs gives a spotless performance as a mothering lance corporal, while Allam's Captain Terri injects timely shots of unease into the evening's gamely upbeat flow.

Kate Stratton - Time Out
December 19th 2001 - January 2nd 2002