Review
Tom King sees Erik the Viking at the Palace Theatre, Westcliff
As a rule, reviewers are owls. Like astronomers, they work at night. So what was your correspondent up to, at 1.30pm, safely tucked up in the stalls of the Palace Theatre, when he should have been tucked up in bed?
Watching the most exciting, inventive, exhilarating and smokey plays to hit the Palace stage in many a long afternoon, that's what. More about the smoke later.
But first let me urge all you nine to fivers to ring in sick and catch one of the matinee performances of Erik the Viking.
The show is represented as a children's entertainment, designed for school parties. But why not office parties and chartered accoutnant's outings as well? Send the kids off to see Inadmissable Evidence and save Erik for yourself.
In common with Andrew Llyod Webber's latest show, Erik started life as a film, yet finds its natural home on stage - a reversal of the traditional process.
The film boasted special effects and spectacular scenes aplenty, yet oddly, the thing it lacked was magic. That is just the very quality that Laurence Sach's adaptation now provides.
Erik was created by Terry Jones, who combines the comic genius of one of Monty Python's leading spirits with a second career as a medieval scholar. Like Tolkien, his knowledge and feel for the dark ages proves him with the foundation for wonderful stories.
You also feel that he has got it right. This is how Vikings looked and dressed. This is how dragons smelt.
The story tells how Erik, a family man more notable for his intellect than his brawn, sets out on the seas to find a lost father and a lost sword. He is accompanied by a band of
fearless warriors, not forgetting one politcally correct Vikingess.