ABFCAP: The Life and Times of Ian Dury

Openly a celebration of and love letter to the singer-songwriter who produced some of the wittiest lyrics of the punk rock era, Jeff Merrifield’s play catches Ian Dury at three points from his peak in the 1980s to his death in 2000.

While the dramaturgy is rudimentary, generally consisting of Dury and his friend/minder/roadie Fred ‘Spider’ Rowe either telling each other things they already know or taking turns addressing the audience directly with memories and anecdotes, the details and performances do accumulate to build a living portrait of the man with all his flaws and contradictions.

It would have been easy to make him just a generic bad boy of rock’n’roll, but Merrifield makes believable connections between Dury’s childhood polio, which left him crippled, and both his creative energy and his dissipation of it. The guy who could be loved and hated by those around him in almost equal measure was paradoxically as happy with a cup of tea as with a bottle of brandy, content to alternate cutting-edge rock with TV ad voiceovers.

Supported by Josh Darcy’s exasperated and loving Spider, Jud Charlton not only does a spot-on impersonation of Dury, both speaking and singing, but creates a rounded, sympathetic character you don’t need to know the original to respond to.