Theatre review: Fanny

Felix Mendelssohn is the 19th century German composer best-known for the Wedding March, but he's just the most famous talent in his family, not the only one. Calum Finlay's Fanny sets out to correct that, putting his older sister centre stage. Fanny Mendelssohn (Charlie Russell) is at the very least an equally talented composer, perhaps the secret behind her brother's success as they often consult each other when stuck on a composition. But his erasure of her contribution may go beyond not acknowledging their collaborations, as he's also published some of her work under his own name, including a piece Queen Victoria famously pronounced her favourite. For now, though, the family's concerns are more domestic, as an old flame of Fanny's has returned to Berlin.

The siblings' mother Lea (Kim Ismay) is determined to marry Fanny off to artist Wilhelm (Riad Richie,) once she's made sure he's still a Lutheran and didn't convert to Catholicism while studying in Rome. Younger sister Rebecka (Danielle Phillips) is just as keen to see this happen as she has suitors of her own she's can't respond to while Fanny is still single, but Felix (Daniel Abbott) gets a shock when he realises marriage might mean music will no longer be her priority. Specifically, it might keep her from helping him fix his, so he sets about sabotaging the couple.

The stage is set for a very silly comedy as befits a show sold on starring one of the core members of Mischief, and there's no end of consciously laboured wordplay: The adorable Wilhelm's key character trait is a love of terrible puns, which is what Fanny likes most about him; things sour between them because Felix has convinced him to dial this down. The final Mendelssohn sibling Paul (Jeremy Lloyd) also provides a lot of the first act's big laughs with his supremely awkward pronouncements and misunderstandings, but he also sets up the second's story when he gives away the secret about whose music the Queen actually liked best.

So after the interval the show becomes a frantic parody of a chase thriller, with Fanny and Wilhelm escaping to England to try and put the record straight, and Felix as the moustache-twirling villain in pursuit. The cast get to multi-role as royalty, innkeepers and coachmen, and things get very athletic as they start somersaulting over barrels and running around a stage not really big enough for the amount of action it sees.

What's perhaps most impressive about what Finlay and director Katie-Ann McDonough have achieved here is balancing a serious point about women whose contribution to history has been buried under that of the men near them, with quite how silly a comedy style they've chosen to tell it in, full of panto wordplay and slapstick. There's a genuine respect and fondness for Fanny coming though here, and while she and Wilhelm are shown from the start as a sweet couple we can root for, he's still made to prove himself worthy of her - and on her own terms as the funny sidekick, not the damsel-rescuing hero.

For the second time in a week I need to dust off the cliché about comic actors easily making the shift into drama and Russell, who's made a career out of pulling faces of exaggerated seriousness, proves she can shift that into the real thing and back on a sixpence. There's real emotion in a scene where she has to expose her legs to a docker to get passage on a ship, and in the dream sequences where she conducts an imaginary orchestra. Even an extended gag where she conducts the audience to make the sounds of the instruments comes across as a genuine tribute to the genius of the sounds Fanny made.

At almost three hours long (with the venue doing what I can most politely describe as a bit of... fudging over what the actual running time is) this is a bit of an epic ask for a daft comedy show, but the cast and creatives manage to live up to the requirements both to keep the energy up that long, and to present a knockabout comedy whose tragedy is rarely that far from the surface.

Fanny by Calum Finlay is booking until the 15th of November at the King's Head Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: David Monteith-Hodge.