As the son of actor, writer and director Lionel Jeffries, Ty Jeffries grew up around the likes of Shirley MacLaine, Diana Dors, Frank Sinatra and Maurice Chevalier. It’s not too surprising, then, that his drag persona has an old-school vibe: all beehive, black feathers and chandelier earrings, ageing starlet and divorcée Miss Hope Springs resembles an outsized Dusty Springfield and, passing references to Natalie Portman aside, ‘Je m’appelle Hope’ might have played happily in a Manhattan piano bar 40 years ago.
Following last year’s ‘Recovering Showgirl’, the solo piece sees our heroine recounting a bittersweet sojourn to Paris after her last husband ditched her for ‘a bubbly brunette called Carlos’. A hooker roommate and sailor lover are the pegs for a gently ribald, thoroughly likeable succession of life lessons, gags and almost a dozen original songs – credible and creditable pastiche showtunes ranging from ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ to ‘I’m Going to Have to Kill You Now, Jean-Jacques’.
If Jeffries’s delivery occasionally stumbles, his command of the intimate space is never in doubt and if the jokes tend towards the cheesy, there’s plenty of sharpness too. Were you familiar, for instance, with the French naval motto ‘à l’eau, ç’est l’heure’…?