James Walton

An original and brilliant show: Loudon Wainwright III at Leicester Square Theatre reviewed

Loudon Wainwright III: Surviving Twin
Leicester Square Theatre

Even by the standards of his fellow confessional singer-songwriters who emerged alongside him in the 1970s, Loudon Wainwright III has spared us very little over the years about his marriages, divorces, affairs and — not surprisingly in the circumstances — his often troubled relationships with his children. (Two of those children, Rufus and Martha, have also exercised their right to reply, perhaps most memorably in Martha’s song ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’.) In this original and brilliant new show, he’s still at it — although this time the primary focus is on his relationship with his own father, who wrote for Life magazine from the early Sixties until his death in 1988.

Wainwright describes Surviving Twin as a ‘posthumous collaboration’. What this means in practice is that he performs (rather than merely reads) some of Loudon II’s more personal columns,  mostly about family life, and then responds with songs that confirm, develop or sometimes contradict what we’ve just heard.

Ian Hislop once claimed that the theme of virtually all American popular culture is ‘I love you, dad.’ But Loudon III’s perspective is of course a lot more complicated, interesting and ultimately convincing than that. He clearly enjoys the fact that his old dad’s journalism stands up so well, and can still get both laughs and little gasps of recognition several decades later. At the same time, however, he leaves us in no doubt that their old rivalry lives on, even though one of the adversaries is 70, and the other has been dead for nearly 30 years.

And, of course, he also knows — and therefore tells us all about — how such father-son rivalry cascades through the generations.

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