Broadly themed around “explorations of our natural world”, Janie Dee’s eclectic series of Beautiful World Cabaret shows at the Charing Cross Theatre concludes with an intimate evening with Maureen Lipman and Friends. The title is a tad disingenuous, as the highlight of a diverse mashup of song, jazz, monologue, verse, and sketches is performances from Dame Maureen’s immensely confident and delightfully talented grandchildren. Thirteen-year-old Ava and ten-year-old Sacha do not just hold their own; they threaten to walk off with the entire evening.
Jacqui Dankworth, bedecked in black velvet and with hair gone wild, delivers a warm, honeyed, and emotionally nuanced song palette. Backed by jazz pianist James Pearson and saxophonist Ava Rosenthal, her varied tunes include As Time Goes By, the Gershwins’ It Ain’t Necessarily So, a beautifully bucolic version of Kurt Weil’s September Song, a bluesy Come Rain Or Come Shine, and a flamenco-influenced take on Michel Legrand’s The Windmills Of My Mind. Rosenthal and Pearson both get solo pieces to add to the evening’s music.
Sketches include a pithy monologue from Lipman on the perils of listening in to other people’s phone conversations on the commute home, and a clever piece from theatrical treasure and West End legend Thelma Ruby, who celebrated her 100th birthday in March, on the dangers of reacquainting with childhood sweethearts. The highlight is a two-hander between Dame Maureen as a patriarchal Canadian goose and grandson Sacha as a lippy, rebellious gosling who does not want to make the long migration from the comforts of Manchester to the cold Canadian tundra. “I’m not really up for it”, he says, wondering why Dad has to fly across an ocean to get his “leg over”. “You’re a goose, not a bleeding barista,” Dad retorts.
Verse comes from readings of their own work by poets Jeremy Robson and Pauline Prior-Pitt. Robson muses on the unlikelihood of finding (and losing) a pair of crimson underwear on the number 14 bus to Putney Bridge. Prior-Pitt gives us a feminist inspired conversation between Eve and God, in which the former attempts to persuade the latter, to little effect, not to let men have dominion over the Earth. “Look, I’m sorry about that fucking apple” is an apologia not necessarily guaranteed to win God over to her cause. The most affecting piece of verse comes in a condemnation of colonialism and indifference to climate change penned by thirteen-year-old Ava (an “old soul on young shoulders”, Lipman tells us, with justifiable pride).
Kind, gentle, engagingly eccentric, Maureen Lipman and Friends (and family) is a 70-minute delight.
Reviewed on 13 July 2025
