With his booming voice, huge physique, and larger-than-life personality, Brian Blessed has not just been a fixture of British TV and films over the last fifty years but has arguably become something of a national treasure. An Afternoon With Brian Blessed adopts a simple premise: Blessed is on stage and regales the audience with anecdotes from his career, his passions for space and mountain climbing, and even offers morsels of his own personal philosophy (along with a smattering of strong language). While anyone who has read his 2015 autobiography Absolute Pandemonium (or listened to the Blessed-narrated audiobook version) may find some familiar material repeated, seeing Blessed on stage (either seated or stalking around) reveals what a force of nature the man is.
Entering onto the stage to the accompaniment of Queen’s “Flash,” from the Blessed-starring film adaptation of Flash Gordon in 1980, Blessed was swiftly interacting with the audience members at the front of the auditorium, even encouraging a sing-along to wish an audience member “Happy Birthday” before launching into his now trademark bellow of “Gordon’s alive!” to much appreciation from the audience. Blessed then recounted how that one line is now synonymous with him to the point where he was asked to say the line by a Russian submarine captain while Blessed was on an expedition to the Magnetic North Pole. He even revealed that he was “not political” but did recount a time shortly after the “plebgate” scandal in 2012 when he visited 10 Downing Street to meet with other explorers to arrange expeditions on behalf of fundraising for various animal rights' charities, where he greeted the police officers by yelling “You’re all plebs!” at them before adding, “It’s ok – I’m a pleb too!” Despite his well-spoken tones, Blessed was born into a working-class family in Yorkshire in 1936 and made several references to his home life throughout the 2 hours of the performance. A familiar face he may be but Blessed certainly hasn’t forgotten his roots.
One of the more amusing tales Blessed told of his time filming Flash Gordon (“A b****y marvellous film,” he said), was of him carrying a cardboard bazooka around and making “pff” noises as he fired. Blessed stalked round the stage during this bit, firing his imaginary bazooka (“Pfft, pfft, pfft, one for you for coming in late!” he added to a late-comer as they took their seat). He stopped and said, “Then there was a shout of ‘Cut’ and someone said, ‘Brian, we put the effects in afterwards!’” Much of Blessed’s anecdotes revolve around humorous incidents, made all the funnier by his comic timing (he knows how to land a punch-line, as well as being more than capable of landing an actual punch too if necessary), his effervescent personality, and his hilarious impressions of Peter O’Toole, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Alec Guinness. His language is often, shall we say, “fruity,” but apparently this hasn’t fazed the Queen when he has met her: on one occasion she encountered him after one of his stints guest hosting Have I Got News For You (although Blessed mistakenly called it Not The Nine O’clock News, a programme which he doesn’t seem to have appeared in), her majesty upbraided Blessed for his use of the f-word before she went on to explain that it was “an Anglo-Saxon word meaning to spread one’s seed” (related to us by a fine impression by the mighty Blessed).
At several points in the show, Blessed even treated the audience to recitals of Shakespearian soliloquies: an anecdote of his first job with the Nottingham Rep Theatre Company went from him building sets badly (“I’m no good with wood, I kept building the doors too small for the sets and people couldn’t make their grand entrance on stage.”), to him passing that job onto a demobbed soldier who wanted to act but, when given a line, would “make the audience want to cut their own throats” because he was that bad an actor. Incredibly, Blessed helped him get an audition with the Oldham Rep Company and then launched into a stirring rendition of the Chorus’ opening speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, which this actor promptly delivered in his audition with Blessed’s advice of not to move, lest they see what a bad actor this person was. Blessed then got a phone call from the aspiring actor to say he’d been given a part in a play for one week and Granada TV came to film one of the performances. The actor soon found himself cast in a new show called Coronation Street. “To this day, whenever I see Bill Roach [Ken Barlow] on Corrie,” Blessed said, “I yell at the TV: ‘Don’t bloody move Bill or else everyone will see what a bad actor you are!”
In amongst the anecdotes, impressions, and raucousness, there were several moments of philosophising from Mr. Blessed. “Everyone’s got something special which no-one else has,” he told the audience before adding he was sick of seeing TV adverts peddling death and then laying into a parody of the sort of life insurance advert which is aimed at over-50s and broadcast during Daytime TV before concluding by saying the advert makers should “Peddle life, you miserable [insert expletive]!” In the second half of the show, Blessed told a touching story of when he was playing Old Deuteronomy in Cats back in the early 1980s and the director (Trevor Nunn) had told him to remain onstage during the interval. He soon found that children would come onto the stage and sit near him during the interval so Blessed would arrange for them to stay onstage in the opening moments of Act Two before guiding them back to their seats so that they could say they had appeared in Cats. On one occasion, he asked a youngster if she was enjoying the show. She stammered back, “Y-y-yes,” at which point he saw her parents in the audience and noticed they were crying. “Have I said something wrong?” he asked them. “No,” replied the girl’s mother, “that’s the first word she’s ever said!” At which point, Blessed, sat in his chair looked out from his reverie towards us and said, “That’s the magic of theatre,” and was swiftly rewarded with applause. He was even rewarded with cheers after causally mentioning shortly after relaying this story that, “By, the way I think Donald Trump is a…” and came out with a word so strong it’d certainly make the Queen blush! As Blessed said as he was approaching the conclusion of the performance, “I will not be [*!*!] restrained by any [*!*!]!” He is certainly a very free spirit!
During the first half of the show, Blessed did seem to sound a bit breathless at times, this may be more from his general excitement than anything else and he would occasionally lose his train of thought (although he did admit that he never knew what he was going to say in advance at these shows) but he did seem a bit more settled in the second half – at least until he began to rattle off Prospero’s closing speech from The Tempest, then Mark Anthony’s speech from Julius Caesar (which he expertly delivered, a genuine masterclass is Shakespearian acting) before climaxing with a recreation of his impression of Pavarotti from 'Stars In Their Eyes' – a genuinely astonishing piece of operatic singing. As Blessed was about to leave the stage, he told the audience: “Don’t let the b******s grind you down, just go for it!” as the audience rose to their feet to give him a well-deserved standing ovation.
If the purpose of any kind of theatrical presentation is to entertain then An Afternoon With Brian Blessed more than delivered. A truly entertaining, funny, warm, performance (and let’s be honest, the Brian Blessed we see in public is as much of a performance as the one Blessed gave as Fancy Smith in Z-Cars back in the 1960s). Like the man himself, it’s big, loud, and an awful lot of fun.
Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 6/4/19
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