The timeline included in the pocket-sized programme for this production of Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds’s 1954 musical – revived by Tête à Tête for the second year in a row – ends in 1956, with the first performance of Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’. One can’t help but think that this detail is a rather droll inclusion, tacitly pointing out that the era of the Angry Young Men more or less spelled the end for such featherweight fluff as this.
Yet whether or not a 2011 audience will take ‘Salad Days’ in the spirit in which it was originally intended, in the hands of Tête à Tête Slade and Reynolds’s show is marvellously entertaining stuff. Certainly it’s no coincidence that it is playing during panto season: it has to be one of the most extravagantly silly musicals I’ve ever seen, beginning with plucky young things Timothy and Jane (Sam Harrison and Katie Moore, both delightful) getting secretly hitched for reasons that don’t really make any sense, centring on their acquisition of a magical piano that makes strangers dance and culminating in their calmly flying over London in an actual flying saucer.
Much is made of this show’s supposed innocence, but Bill Bankes-Jones’s production is unreservedly knowing. Drippy Tim, fragrant Jane and everybody in the chipper, Brylcreemed world they inhabit are magnified into absurd English archetypes; the whole thing has a wry, ‘Round the Horne’-esque hilarity to it, abetted by Quinny Banks’s kitsch choreography and a gifted cast. Whether subverted by Tête à Tête, or simply such a product of its times that it now works as a spoof of them, this is tremendous fun.