This tender tribute to dancing/mime/commedia dell’arte masters Barry and Joan Grantham is as sweet and nostalgic as elderflower cordial. Married for donkey’s years, the couple are somewhere in their 80s or 90s. This film is airily unspecific about such details, although every clip showing one of their film appearances is accompanied by a date, some going back to the 1940s.
Manchester-reared Barry started out as a “ballet boy”, trained with famed dancer Stanislas Idzikowski whom he still refers to as his “beloved master”, and even appeared in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes in 1948. Joan, from the more genteel home counties, was a second or third generation musician and came up through the business as a dancer as well, but also tickled the ivories; now she mostly plays accompaniment on the piano in the couple’s studio as they train various adult pupils in the mysteries of commedia, diction and performance in general.
