10/08/23

Assembly George Square (Gordon Aikman Theatre), Edinburgh

Back in the olden days before there was The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent, a certain presenter by the name of Hughie Green was the Simon Cowell of his day, fronting a shonky TV show called Opportunity Knocks. It was avidly watched, every week, by up to twenty million viewers.

I’m actually old enough to recall the fateful night in 1974 when opportunity knocked for Lena Zavaroni, a precocious nine-year-old from the Isle of Bute. She strode on to that little stage and sang a totally inappropriate song in a voice that could just as well have come from a seasoned veteran. British audiences were both shocked and delighted… and the votes flooded in.

The rest, of course, is tragedy. Lena was catapulted headlong into overnight fame, but was persuaded to move away from her parents’ council house in Scotland to live in London with her manager, Dorothy Soloman (Helen Logan). There she was groomed – there’s no more appropriate word for what happened to her – for stardom. After five consecutive wins on Opportunity Knocks, she was politely asked to step aside and then went on to tour the world. But you can’t separate a young child from her parents without dire consequences further down the road. Her father, Victor (Alan McHugh), and her mother, Hilda (Julie Coombe), could only look on in horror as their daughter’s world began to disintegrate around her….

In Tim Whitnall’s play, Lena’s story is recounted by none other than Hughie Green himself (the usual note-perfect impersonation by Jon Culshaw), while Erin Armstrong plays Lena, from childhood right up to her tragic demise at the age of thirty-five, somehow convincing us she can be all those ages without any prosthetics. Here too, a real character is uncannily recreated, complete with those cheesy costumes and that big, BIG voice. The production details have the ring of authenticity – there’s even a clap-o-meter! And if the character of Dorothy Solomon occasionally veers uncomfortably close to pantomine, well, no matter, every fairy tale must have a villain to hiss.

Lena captures an incredible true story, and I have to confess I appear to have something in my eyes as it approaches its inevitable, heartbreaking conclusion.

We’d like to think that it couldn’t possibly happen in this day and age, but a glance at the latest headlines is enough to confirm that, when it comes to the way we treat celebrities, we don’t appear to have learned anything at all.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney