Edinburgh Festival 2003 – Assembly Rooms
NO FEAR OF OLD TROUPER LINDA GOING QUIETLY.
When a girl hits 60, she has the choice of either retiring gracefully or carrying on disgracefully.
Luckily for us, the amazing Linda Marlowe has chosen the latter course, and No Fear! – the latest of her three solo shows to arrive in Edinburgh – is in some ways the most extraordinary of them all.
Festival Fringe-goers will remember her lacerating delivery of Berkoff’s Women and the deep poignancy of Diatribe of Love, in which a woman decides to leave her husband on her silver wedding anniversary.
Now Miss Marlowe has quarried her own colourful life to produce a rich, powerful concoction, the memories of an unstoppable performer on the eve of her 100th birthday.
Crouched in a bald wig and pink tutu, Miss Marlowe totters eloquently across the floor, as if on a high wire, and almost apologetically, performs a few magic tricks.
She then rips off the mask and dress pulls on her black strides, shakes out her auburn locks and launches into a terrifying account of a one-off drug-smuggling escapade to pay for her son’s education.
She was always unconventional. She pretended she was 18 (when she was 14) to be screen-tested at Pinewood Studios when Marilyn Monroe was filming there with Laurence Olivier.
She looks back with an aching tenderness on a rare episode of same-sex sensuality, and she also looks back, with a little bitterness and a lot of love, on four marriages, two abortions and three years of “shouting, screaming and shagging” on the road when she formed the all-female rock group The Sadista Sisters.
Amazingly, she does not refer to her role in the original London cast of one of the most famous West End shows of all time Oh! Calcutta!
Her director, Gavin Marshall, has knocked her memories into some exceptionally vivid and entertaining monologues. Through them, Linda celebrates her own impetuosity and frantic battiness, as when a pair of car keys goes missing or when she and the second Mrs Marlowe go to the wedding of the third Mrs Marlowe.
Getting a divorce was difficult when she started, but the saga is wonderfully well worked into a spoof Raymond Chandler story in which Marlowe is obviously the name to have.
She ends the show by swinging gloriously on a trapeze, upside down, still chatting, still flying.
What a trouper!
Michael Coveney, The Daily Mail, 13th August 2003
Linda Marlowe 