How do you make your act feel new, 40 years on? Arguably, Fascinating Aïda didn’t feel new in the first place: there was always something purposefully vintage about their Flanders and Swann-alike shtick, all lyrical wit – and satirical barbs – in evening wear and genteel harmonies. It feels no newer, nor a day older, in this anniversary tour, which combines caustic social comment, occasional plangency and a filthiness that only gets more gleeful as the trio (well, two of them at least) bear down on their dotage.
At two-and-a-half hours, I can’t claim the show is all killer and no filler – but one of its highlights is a killer about filler, a terse cosmetic surgery number emerging from three completely immobile faces. Here and elsewhere (Dillie Keane’s dogging song tumesces to mind), the threesome delight in sandblasting vestigial expectations of middle-aged female decorum. Sometimes, vulgarity comes dressed as vivacity, usually in the hands of junior member Liza Pulman, whose West End sparkle might be too bright for me, if not offset by Adèle Anderson’s mordant manner and Keane’s juvenile delinquency – now cackling at a nugget of smut, now traipsing to the piano, her face a study in sullenness, to pitch the next song.
There’s always the pleasure here of a well-wrought lyric, of the ticklish wait between one unlikely line-ending (“sleet falls,” say) and the word with which it rhymes. (What else but “meatballs”?) Some songs are less thrilling, and more predictable, than others. The UK citizenship test is familiar territory, turned here into a ditty about British foibles that wouldn’t disgrace, nor greatly surprise anyone, on Radio 4. Several numbers (one on complacent western holidaymakers; one on being reincarnated as a kangaroo) are likable on the ear without ever raising the comic temperature. I prefer when the trio go off-piste, or surreal even – with a tuneless track about atonal German singing, or when Keane announces a song about doppelgangers, before claiming to resemble the unlikeliest celebrity imaginable.
Aged 71 and counting, Keane’s mischievous spirit shows no signs of dilution here, and is the big attraction in this polished and enjoyable anniversary show.
