Being Sellers by Carl Caulfield – Waterloo East Theatre, London

[written for The Public Reviews]

Waterloo East Theatre, only opened in September this year and promising to offer affordable and accessible entertainment to the local community, is a small and interesting space in a disused railway arch. Privately funded, I hope that this theatre proves to be successful, as it has with its previous two sell-out shows, in order to offer some hope for culture and the arts in the current economic climate. As many small and independent theatres face closure, Waterloo Theatre East is courageously looking to the future and bringing innovative and fringe work to London's theatreland. And Being Sellers is a show which could put Waterloo East Theatre on the map. David Boyle delivers a virtuoso performance as the great comic actor Peter Sellers in this energetic one-hander, marking the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Little more than an hour long, the play charts Sellers' life, starting with his death. The audience enters to Boyle confined to a hospital bed, creating a clamour and delivering sharp one-liners ('no visitors again? Bastards') until he overworks himself performing a speech from Hamlet and keels over. Sellers then finds himself in purgatory where he rehearses his life (and that is the correct word for it, in this play which is obsessed with the actor's craft) attempting to discover where he went wrong and why there are obstacles to him making his peace with the world. During a frenzied performance where we meet Inspector Clueso and Doctor Strangelove, among others, Boyle's Sellers reveals himself to be a schizophrenic clown, a paranoid player who can inhabit many characters but remains isolated from his own being.

Not knowing much about the life and work of Sellers was no impediment, for me, to enjoying this play although the jokes would have been funnier if I had of understood the context more fully. Yet the humour offered more than the occasional in-joke and, like Sellers' comedy, was simple but brilliant with its anarchic slapstick quality. Boyle's best moment was a sketch based on Sellers' radio series 'The Goon Show' where he conjured the world of suggested visual humour perfectly. This is a comic and entertaining play, but a dark side to Sellers' personal life is revealed - probe beneath the showbiz surface and jealousy, ego mania and dysfunctional family relationships are revealed. After an hour of probing his life and self, Sellers calls himself a 'nasty self-centred little shit' and 'a spoiled little brat, not a tortured genius'. There is a deep sadness to Sellers who sees himself as a cipher; when he is playing a character it is 'like a tenant renting me out for a while' and when he isn't acting he is unoccupied. At the end of the play Sellers has had enough and retreats into the audience, he just wants to watch for a while. The surrounding narrative is fanciful and possibly no to everyone's taste but Boyle's performance can't be faulted; he comes very close to being Sellers.

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