Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Walk on the wild side

A good title works wonders at the Edinburgh Fringe. Oliver Reed: Wild Thing (Gilded Balloon) has a simple and succinct name that promises excitement, drama and celebrity gossip. And it delivers. Mike Davis and Bob Crouch’s exhilarating monologue races through the chief highlights of Oliver Reed’s career. Showmanship ran in his veins. On his father’s side, he was the grandson of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the founder of Rada. But the connection was illegitimate. Reed’s grandmother had six children with Tree although they never married. Her surname, she claimed, was a facetious comment on the relationship. ‘I’m a frail Reed in the shadow of a mighty Tree.’

Young Ollie was packed off to boarding school where everyone spoke in posh ‘quack-quack’ accents. He was a keen athlete, a reluctant bully and a hopeless scholar. ‘I wore my dunce’s cap like a crown.’ At 17, he discovered Soho. After getting into a fight at a strip club, he was hired as a bouncer. His father despaired. ‘You’ll either become a burglar or an actor.’ After taking roles in Hammer Horror films, playing smouldering villains and doomed counts, he auditioned for Bill Sikes in Oliver! He got it. ‘An actor playing a burglar.’

He became a superstar. From his mansion in Surrey he began to set world records for boozing. He claims to have consumed 120 pints of beer in a single evening. He refused to further his career by pandering to Hollywood royalty. He called Jack Nicholson ‘a balding midget’. And when Steve McQueen flew to England to discuss a film project the meeting ended prematurely after Reed vomited on McQueen’s shoes.

Rob Crouch, a charismatic performer, shows us Ollie as a schoolboy, a movie idol and a grizzled, elderly drunk. He reveals his warmth, his volatility, and something else as well: the sheer village-idiot strangeness of the man.

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