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Borge Again.
 This year's Fringe sees the return of British musical comedian Rainer Hersch with a show devoted to the legendary Victor Borge. In 2000 Adelaide audiences acclaimed his show 'All Classical Music Explained' and it was critics who initially pointed to comparisons between Hersch and Borge who was, at one stage, the world's highest paid entertainer.
"It was starting out in music that triggered this career," Hersch explains. "I started off doing my own musical routines and stuff. That's what I'm known for in the UK. All of my comedy shows have been about classical music and that's what I did six years ago at the Adelaide Fringe. It was this show that brought about comparisons between myself and Victor Borge. So I started off doing my own thing and wandered off onto someone else's turf."
Danish-born Borge, like Hersch, started life as a classical musician, yet one who escaped from the Nazis to a new life in the US. "His is a fascinating life which inspired me to write this play - not only his routines but his life. When he arrived in the US, Borge couldn't speak English, learnt it from his American wife and the cinema, and within eighteen months, he was performing on [Bing] Crosby's radio show. It's a classic 'rag to riches' story. He was Jewish, and like my own father, escaped from the Nazis."
Back in the 'fifties and 'sixties when Borge was truly a household name, comedic material based around classical music was much more common and widely appreciated. Performers like Anna Russell, Spike Jones and the inimitable PDQ Bach were able to carve out significant careers and rather ironically, Rainer Hersch explained that he had done radio programmes on all of these artists for the BBC.
"There was a time in the 'fifties, especially in America, when classical music was much more current than it is today. It was common fare on the weekends to have the likes of Stokowski perform on radio live from the Chicago Philharmonic or whatever and as a result, there was a currency about classical music that simply does not exist today. "There's no question about that and yet people still do recognise this music from cartoons, the cinema and TV commercials even if they don't know what those pieces are called or who wrote them. So if you start from Beethoven's Fifth symphony or the William Tell overture rather than the Goldberg Variations, then the audience will come with you."
Hersch briefly met Borge in 1996 just after he had started his own 'stand up' about classical music. "So in the show I re-enact just what it was like to meet him" - acting out both the great Dane and himself.
"The show works on a number of levels but importantly, it's an interesting story that I felt gripped enough by to write this play. I don't do impressions but in this case, I felt so drawn to it. So even if you don't know anything about Borge, you'll still enjoy it. It's a funny show, delivered - I hope - with my stand-up guile.
I'd also point out that the routines for which Borge is best known - Phonetic Punctuation as it was called, and Inflationary Language - when you add one to the number you find in words - are not musical. So while Borge played the piano and was strongly associated with classical music, he actually had the same problem - finding the roots through serious music to the lowest common denominator."
And as Hersch perceptively notes, the people who remember Borge "aren't full-on musos and he certainly wouldn't have had the wide appeal he did if he'd stuck with Bach and Beethoven".
"I've rewritten his material so that it's no longer his. I'm not producing word for word what he said. Sure I do his routines but I've updated them, I hope. For example, he first performed Poetic Punctuation in 1937 and was still performing it sixty years later - a few years before he died. So 'Borge Again!' is rewritten, updated, but still within his style."
Brett Allen-Bayes
 | 'Borge Again!' plays at Caos Cafˇ, Hindley Street, from Sat 24 Feb as part of the Fringe |
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