I sat next to the author last night for I Love Lucy. This is not so much play as a sort of memoir and a love letter to a very dear friend. A woman who was loved by ‘ninety per cent of the world’. Not sure about this, but certainly at the time of her fame she occupied many a TV screen for a half hour every week for twenty-five years.
The young Lee Tannen watched every episode after it was recorded – each one over and over again. It was a wonderful surprise to him as a child when he found out he was actually related to his idol . It took him a while before he could actually speak to her without stammering but when he did he became a very close friend for the last ten years of her life after her much-regretted divorce from Desi Arnaz.
It is related in first person with Stefan playing the young Lee. He is a very attractive young man with warmth and humour and great timing and Sandra Dickenson is a revelation as Lucy – she treats the character with enormous compassion and she is totally grounded – not the feather-brained character we saw on the screen – resembling rather more a kind of strawberry blonde Ethel Merman.
He gives her many amusing things to say although as in this kind of memoir one thinks maybe he tweaks it a little in order to get the full humour of the lines. She is incredibly funny in her remarks about Joan Crawful, Lauren Bacall , her strange encounters with Bette Davies and her infatuation with the beautiful Carole Lombard and her widowed husband Clark Gable – who never recovered from the sorrow of her death..
At one point he cleverly gives his version of a scene – and then the real one of what really happened just as we all edit our stories when we tell them, in order to make them more interesting.
As I said it doesn’t really function as a play but an account of an unusual relationship. The story is told with great humour and quite a bit of pathos. It’s a great evening’s entertainment.
pyekan 