At the start of this revival of his one-man show, Victor Spinetti explains that if you're going to name-drop, you should make sure the names "bounce".
Exactly what he means by this is uncertain, but he presses on regardless into an epic account of the legions of celebrities with whom he has hobnobbed over the past 45-odd years.
So, in a two-hour extemporisation to arouse the jealousy of the tsar of ad-libbing himself, Peter Ustinov, we are whisked through the star-studded party of Spinetti's life.
On the way, we meet everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Franco Zeffirelli and Richard Attenborough to Marlene Dietrich.
Born of Italian-Welsh stock in South Wales, Spinetti's first break came in 1955, understudying in South Pacific with, of all people, a slenderly known Sean Connery. The show's famous song, Some Enchanted Evening, was to serve as a lucky tune for the rest of Spinetti's charmed life. Stardom beckoned after his Tony award-winning Broadway role in Oh! What A Lovely War - catapulting him to the centre of the Sixties' celebrity scene.
He became an unlikely cult hero after appearing in the Beatles' films and discovered from Salvador Dali that "the English put violin bows in the anuses of canaries and masturbate".
However, years of partying with the likes of Brendan Behan and Richard Burton have done little to alter Spinetti's appearance. He may have shaved his head, but his famous eyebrows and big, naughty, bug eyes remain as lively as ever. Nor, under Ned Sherrin's doting direction, has he lost his talent for mimicry - matched only by his talent for talking multilingual gibberish.
His show is also broken by the bewitching recitation of his own poetry, but it's the name-dropping that leads the way and by the time he's done, you see what he meant about "bouncing". He refers to the vicarious pleasure which he took from famous others and which rebounds off him to his star-struck audience.
Victor Spinetti
