Writer and Director: Melanie Branton
Melanie Branton’s two-hour show, The Full English, currently on tour around perfidious Albion, charts the 2000-year course of English language development from the Viking era to the present day. A writer and lecturer, Branton perfected her performance style on the comedy circuit and represented Bristol, “Where every day is ‘speak like a pirate’ day”, near her hometown of Weston-super-Mare, at three national poetry slam finals.
A certifiable lover of the English language, she takes great delight in presenting the quirks and backstories of this constantly developing ‘motley medley hotchpotch bag of tricks”. Energetic and kinetic, she has the enthusiasm of Joyce Grenfell, the forthright incisiveness of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the wit of John Hegley and the surreal, prop-rich creativity of Simon Munnery.
Like a favourite teacher that makes learning fun, Branton draws unwavering attention to what could have been a dry chronological description by seamlessly weaving poems, songs, comic discourse and silly hats (helmets, mostly: Roman, Viking, pith) in among the historical threads. And there’s a barrage of one-liners, beginning with the endearingly self-deprecating “You, like a 99, are stuck with a Flake.”
Audience participation is frequent, including boos and thumbs down for the guttural Vikings (“rubbish house guests”) and forcible ‘Simon Says’ pose-striking for the prescriptive 18th-century grammarian Bishop Lowth.
Branton is down on the Vikings, with their pervasive k- and g- ‘Ryvita-munching’ sounds, fashioning a poem from them, about an overbearing boyfriend: all skulk, stank, scalp and scurf. “His snaggle teeth were more like fangs”. At which point Branton deploys her charmingly English dentition to full effect.
She also decries the cracking out of bunting in regard to 1066, when the Vikings, thinly disguised as Normans (“Norse-men…take by force-men, show no remorse-men”) reappeared to inflict French ruling terms on the English: Gouvernement, Parlement, Conseil, Juge…
Another poem cusses the Anglo-Saxon “rough and ready party boys’ that put paid to indigenous Brethonic / Celtic in the 5th century – but Branton admits that it’s their words that now constitute the ‘bread and butter’ of English: “love, hate, fear and happiness”. Anglo-Saxon now takes up only 25% of the dictionary but has the ‘feels’ that Latin terms – “cold, clinical words of the brain” – lack.
Branton has the hots for Kentish lad William Caxton, a “moveable type” who left his homelands at 20 to study Flemish printing and became “the continental father of the English printing press”. From 1476, his work helped to standardise English spelling – “people started saying ‘eggs’ rather than ‘eyren’ cos they’d seen it in a book” – and he put the Dutch ‘h’ in ‘ghost’.
The facts and ideas pour out relentlessly, and much of the material is likely to be revelatory among any given crowd. It’s clear that Branton has given very thoughtful consideration to the effects of empire-building, transportation and the Internet. Audience members taking notes could probably sit a GCSE in the interval. But it’s all presented engagingly.
There’s a flipchart demonstration of the best use of prepositions, a poem about the great 15th century vowel shift (ship/sheep; life/laif and so on) delivered on review night with the help of a flash card-wielding Scandinavian audience member (smarting somewhat at the denigration of the Vikings, but mellowed by a few glasses of wine), and an amusing sock puppet debate between combative 16th century lexicographers ‘Team Purist’, who want the English ‘starcraft’ and ‘crossed’ to triumph over the European ‘astronomy’ and ‘crucified’ of opposing team ‘Delegation Neologiser’.
Branton’s sumptuous poems reach deep into the potential of English, especially the cracking opener, constructed from her all-time favourite words. Other lexicological standouts include lines on the joys of double negatives (inspired by her mum’s pet peeve ‘We Don’t Need No Education’), the U.S. / U.K. divide: ‘You Want To Be Different From Us’, and Hinglish: “You’re speaking perfect Hindi whatever you think, Your language has been written on with indelible Indian ink”. Her prize-winning poems for children, including one about Instagramming her food after she’d eaten it (“I photographed my pizza; I watched it whirl and fizz”), are also highly entertaining.
The sheer volume of thoughtful, well-constructed, intricate material is very impressive, but it does at times feel as if Branton is rushing to fit it all in before the allotted running time, making her occasional “What’s my next line?”-type hesitation quite welcome. Time pressure may also explain a few baffling omissions: any mention of King Alfred the Great (if he hadn’t beaten the Vikings at the Battle of Edington in 878, Englanders might all be speaking Danish and worshipping ravens now) and the decision of U.S. founding fathers to speak English rather than German.
It’s a fairly intellectual show but not overwhelmingly so: the vibe is relaxed, ‘wrong’ answers to questions flung out into the auditorium are met kindly, and Branton takes time to meet the audience before, during and after the performance. Funny, informative and clever, The Full English will appeal to pretty much everyone who uses words and likes to laugh.
Runs until 20 September 2025
