Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg in Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story. Photo by Vincent McMillen

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Evie and Alfie, an older retired couple, sit in their house. Nothing happens for some time.”

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That was the inspiration (and the initial stage direction), of Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story. The unusual romantic comedy created by, and starring, the Brit-born Toronto-based Fringe faves Alex Dallas (Sensible Footwear, Horseface) and Jimmy Hogg (The Potato King), returns to Edmonton as a theatrical Valentine for a single performance Feb. 14, as part of the Fringe Theatre season,.

It was Hogg who had the idea and wrote that first line. “I really liked the idea of seeing two old people in their house,” he says. “That stillness, that tranquility, that sense that ‘we weren’t always like this, you know’…. You see elderly people — we’re all guilty — and you forget that they’ve had all this, who knows what?, in their lives before.” And Evie and Alfie take us back through the years and that ‘who knows what?’ to their first encounter in a pub and big-M life Moments after that. As Dallas puts it “they take us by the hand and lead us through the story…. We fell in love with the characters before we really had a structure.”

The play returns the characters to the present from time to time. The writing process was a matter of Hogg and Dallas asking “what parts of these people’s lives, what moments, do we want to see?”. They made a list, wrote short scenes, separately and together. And they ended up with three times as much material as they could use.

Jimmy Hogg and Alex Dallas in ‘Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story’. Photo by Vincent McMillen

Both best known of late to Canadian audiences as solo performers, Hogg and Dallas are two-decade veteran artists of the Fringe circuit.  The Fringe, says the former, “was the mother of this collaboration,” an origin story with wide currency in Canadian theatre. “I have this idea for a two-hander; do you want to write it with me?” Hogg remembers asking in 2003 at the Victoria Fringe in a brainstorming pitch backstage you could still hear any summer at any Fringe in the country. And the correct and only answer was Dallas’s: “absolutely!” A new show, “set somewhere in the Thatcher Britain of the ‘70s, was born in that exchange,

“We’d known each other for a long time,” says Dallas, originally a Londoner, of her stage partner, who’s from Plymouth. “All our British-ness resonated.” Their working-class backgrounds had their similarities — “to a point,” says Dallas; “with loads of corollaries,” says Hogg. “Where we really aligned,” he adds, “was in our leftist leanings and politics… and massive amounts of kindness and empathy for all kinds of people.”

“We knew quite a bit about each other’s parents and how we were brought up,” says Dallas. “And there’s something very beautiful about that shorthand when you’re improvising or writing…. We don’t have to explain anything to each other. AND we make each other laugh. Actually, it’s very difficult not to be hysterically laughing the whole time.”

What Dallas loves about Evie and Alfie is its “richness,” she says. “It’s so poignant, and with a lot of laughs…. Not just one joke; you get a big range.” What they discovered at their meetings, among stories about their parents, was that “old people are obsessed with bins, with garbage, how much, who’s taking it out, and when,” says Hogg. Dallas laughs that since Ford has privatized recycling in Ontario, it’s an obsession she now officially shares: it’s been three weeks since blue bags have been picked up in Toronto. Where should they go? “Bins have taken over my life,” she says. “That means I’m old.”

Dallas arrived in Canada as part of the hit feminist comedy troupe Sensible Footwear, who emigrated at the time of the Thatcher/John Major arts cuts in the U.K. She and her cohorts weren’t theatre school-type actors. “We were compelled by the ideas, and comedy as the medium for getting those ideas out.… We had a nearly 20-year career in the U.K. and Canada by learning as we went.”

“When you’re young you have this wonderful innocence … never thinking you can’t do something.” At the Edinburgh Fringe “we threw ourselves onto the stage with all these experienced veteran actors and we never thought we shouldn’t be there. We were “oh great, we’ll join in!’.” She’s amused by the memory of such chutzpah.

The Sensible Footwear introduction to Canadian Fringes came first, via the Vancouver Comedy Festival. The Edmonton Fringe had no performance slots left. But they told Brian Paisley, “no problem, we’ll come anyway.” And they did, ensconcing themselves in the Renford Inn on Whyte (free rooms in return for cabaret nights). “We’d march the audience from the Fringe to the hotel, holding a string. And then when they got there, we’d charge them to come in…. That’s the beauty of youth! Let’s just do these crazy mad things.”

And “we fell in love with Canada. We were smitten!”

Hogg arrived in Canada “by accident,” he says. He’d dropped out of school at 16 (“I didn’t like it at all”). There’s a sort of free-association about the chain of events that got him a degree in academic theatre (“no one in my family had ever been to a university; they were all military”). In the summer he studied commedia in France, physical theatre in Spain…. And I became a sort of hard-core physical theatre/ Lecoq-type clown person.”

Completely broke, Hogg visited some university pals in Toronto in 2003. And he never left. His own Fringe debut as a solo performer — not losing money was his obsession of the time he says — came a year later in Minneapolis. “I printed 2,500 fliers. I flier-ed every day all day. I spoke to everyone; I talked non-stop. All day. Every day. Just from fear…. And then I sold out the entire run.” That show, the first of Hogg’s nine solo Fringe shows, was Curriculum Vitae, “about one person’s search for the right job.” And at the Fringe he found his.

So there’s substantial Fringe cred behind the love story that arrives here with Evie and Alfie on Valentine’s Day, before summer engagements that include, so far, Fringes in Toronto, Victoria, and Winnipeg. 

PREVIEW

Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg

Directed by: James Gangl

Where: Westbury Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: February 14, one night only

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca