Laurel and Hardy: Stars on enduring friendship as show about the famous double act comes back to theatres

It was a partnership famous for its slapstick arguments and cartoon violence, but Laurel and Hardy’s enduring legacy is forged in the friendship they formed behind the scenes.

In a case of life imitating art, Barnaby Power and Steven McNicoll, the actors who portrayed the comedy duo in an acclaimed Edinburgh stage production nearly 20 years ago, also became close friends, and now, just as Stan and Laurel put a smile on faces during the Depression, Power and McNicoll hope to do the same as theatre emerges from the pandemic.

Seventeen years ago, the actors were thrown together with just three weeks’ notice in a revival of celebrated playwright Tom McGrath’s acclaimed play, Laurel & Hardy. They struck up an instant friendship that has endured to this day, as they reprise the roles from a new perspective – as older men closer in age to what Stan and Ollie were at the end of their film careers.

“We didn’t know each other before we started, but I knew Tony Cownie, our director, very well and he told me he’d found a wonderful guy to play Stan,” recalled McNicoll, whose screen credits include Rab C Nesbitt and kids’ show Molly & Mack. “When we met, we went for a costume fitting and then for a haircut. We were sitting side by side when the barber asked what we were doing and I heard Barney do Stan’s voice for the first time. The hairs on my neck stood up. He nailed it.”

Power said: “I remember the photoshoot afterwards. When he walked in the room in costume I just thought, blimey! He embodies the part wonderfully. The new photoshoot we did for this current production, when we saw each other back in the costumes, made us feel like we’d never been away.

© Kobal/Shutterstock

“Seventeen years ago, we didn’t know each other and we had to get to know each other and the characters in a really short space of time – just three weeks. Fortunately, we got on really well and we kept in touch.”

McNicoll continued: “After our first meeting, we went for a drink and became firm friends and have been ever since. We’re on the same page about pretty much everything, as people as well as in acting. It’s great to be working together again, because we had such a good time in 2005.”

Tom McGrath, who collaborated with Billy Connolly and Jimmy Boyle during a long career, wrote Laurel & Hardy in the 1970s and it was an immediate success. The team from the 2005 version – actors Power and McNicoll, director Tony Cownie, on-stage pianist Jon Beales and choreographer Rita Henderson – have reunited for the 2022 production.

“That doesn’t happen often, because getting artists together at the same time is like herding cats, but now it feels like we’ve never been away,” McNicoll said. “We’ve had 17 years to think about it and I suppose there’s a different perspective to it now that we’re older and we have a chance to look at it a bit deeper.

“When we first did it, we were the same age as Laurel and Hardy were when Hal Roach teamed them together. Barney is two years older than me, as Stan Laurel was two years older than Ollie. I was 35 the first time and he was 37. Now we’re at the age where things started to go pear-shaped for them – so I hope that is not the case for us!”

The play is about friendship, reminiscing and the power of comedy, and it’s in the latter that getting the duo’s most famous scenes right proved most important. “In 2005, Barney and I would meet on a Sunday and watch the movies over and over, and absorb,” McNicoll said.

© Alan McCredie

“Rita has a difficult job as choreographer, because you have no differing camera angles or cutaways in theatre like you do on film, so she has to find a way of tweaking it and she’s done so brilliantly. Coming back, the routines have taken care of themselves. Like a dance, I think they have locked into our muscles.”

Both actors were fans of the duo growing up.

“When I was a kid, the short films of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy were on TV, and it was Laurel and Hardy I warmed to and I think it was because they were a duo,” Power said. “The two of them messing up together but remaining friends is what drew me to them.”

What drew McNicoll to the play in 2005 was not only the chance to play Hardy and to work with Tom McGrath, but to investigate what happens to clown-like figures when they grow old.

“It’s a subject that has always fascinated me,” added McNicoll. “What happens to old clowns? You look at late films by Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and the thing about clowns is they find it difficult to age with their audience, their audience has them frozen in aspect. When Chaplin abandoned the tramp character, he found it difficult to take the audience with him. Comedy seems to be a young person’s game and the play deals with all of that.

“They were one of the few double acts with a harmonious relationship. I found a wonderful interview with Hardy on YouTube, just as he was about to go off to France to make their ill-fated last film, and the journalist asked him if they were glad to be back together, and Hardy told him they had never been apart, they hadn’t fallen out, they just hadn’t been making films.

“I thought that was very nice, and very rare, to be together for more than 20 years.”

Laurel & Hardy, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until June 25.