Just A Gigolo

Angelo Ravagli was, to quote Alan Bennett, the fodder of art. The inspiration for virile gamekeeper Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover gains a rare voice in Just a Gigolo from veteran film actor Maurice Roëves. But it’s a stilted voice and one whose grasp of English and of empathy is limited. If writer and director Stephen Lowe means to humanise Ravagli with this monologue, he’s unsuccessful. 

The Italian Ravagli is repugnantly seedy. No reference to food, nature, or vehicle is just that, but some thinly disguised metaphor for satisfying the needs of a frustrated woman – a woman like Frieda Lawrence whose affair with household handyman Ravagli allegedly inspired the infamous novel. 

But by the play’s 1959 setting, Ravagli is sexually neutered by age. It depicts him struggling to gain the upperhand over the art that will outlive him, bartering obscene paintings by DH Lawrence to a Greek hotelier in New Mexico. A slideshow of the gaudy works is projected in the sparely staged production and each provokes some new reminiscence for Ravagli. These are disparate and difficult to follow and only a tale of his drinking alone with the ashes of Lawrence is memorable. 

At 75, Roëves must be the oldest star of a one-man play at the Fringe. He brings a bracing sliminess to Ravagli but no sympathy. The frequent insistence he’s no gigolo is too easily cracked by a desire for recognition in any form. Despite raising clear issues about art and its human subjects, this hour alone with him is ultimately unpleasant.