The Boy Friend - Sandy Wilson

A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:
Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

support the site

The Boy Friend

by
Sandy Wilson

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Boy Friend
Author:	Sandy Wilson
Genre:	Play
Written:	1955
Length:	123 pages
Availability:	The Boy Friend - US
	The Boy Friend - UK
	The Boy Friend - Canada

DVD:	The Boy Friend - US
	The Boy Friend - UK

First performed in 1953
With a Preface by Vida Hope
With illustrations by the author
The Boy Friend was made into a film in 1971, directed by Ken Russell and starring Twiggy

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B : light and thin fare on the page, but charming enough

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The NY Times	.	1/10/1954	Brooks Atkinson
Sunday Times	.	6/12/1953	Harold Hobson
The Times	.	2/12/1953	.
The Times	.	15/1/1954	.

From the Reviews:

"Mr. Wilson's light cartoon of the standard musical play of the Twenties is extremely well done in manuscript as well as on stage. (...) The Boy Friend is a caricature of the hokum musical comedy of the Twenties and a mighty good one, too. " - Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

"The Boy Friend, by Sandy Wilson, is not a musical comedy of the 1920s; it is the musical comedy of the 1920s, the epitome, the essence of them all. (...) The middle-aged can go to the Embassy to restore their youth, and the young to perceive what kind of entertainment it was that Rodgers and Hammerstein have killed." - Harold Hobson, Sunday Times

"It will succeed with the general playgoer on its own unusual merits. Like all the best jokes it is carried out with gravity, and like all good pastiche it shows the strictest regard for the essentials of the style that it imitates. (...) Mr. Wilson's invented tunes are good and characteristic tunes of the period; the story has all the old absurdities. How banal we once thought the music, how preposterous the romance; now in pastiche they are both rather touching. " - The Times

"Gaiety was the note of the period, and this must be the gayest show in town to-day." - The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       The Boy Friend was a stunning stage-success in its day -- one of the longest-running shows in London when it completed its first run -- and is also notable for having been Julie Andrews' American stage debut and then, in 1971, being adapted (quite freely) for the screen by Ken Russell (with Twiggy in the lead).
       It is a musical, straight out of and set in the 1920s, with the Charleston all the rage. It is set in Nice, where Polly, the seventeen-year-old daughter of millionaire Percival Browne, is attending Madame Dubonnet's Finishing School. The students are looking forward to the evening's Carnival Ball -- with Polly, who will be going as Pierrette, pretending she has a suitor who will accompany her, though in fact she doesn't, as her father, who: "thinks that every man who makes advances to me is just after my fortune", basically forbids her to have a boyfriend.
       When Polly's costume is delivered by a messenger boy, Tony, the two instantly click and Polly invites him to the ball -- she has an extra ticket and there's a Pierrot costume waiting for him. Soon, it's all settled:

POLLY: Now I shall really enjoy the Carnival Ball.

TONY: So shall I ! By Jove, I never thought I should be going to it with anyone like you. It makes me feel rather nervous.

POLLY: Nervous ? Why ?

TONY: Well, me just a messenger boy and you a rich young lady from the Villa Caprice.

POLLY: Rich ? Oh, I'm not rich. You see -- I just work there as Madame Dubonnet's secretary.

TONY: Do you honestly ? Then we're not so different after all.

       Of course, she doesn't, honestly -- but they aren't so different after all, after all, as we know that Tony isn't who he is pretending to be either. Indeed, his parents, Lord and Lady Brockhurst, happen to be visiting Nice at the time, and they have a wayward son who abandoned Oxford ("ruining a brilliant career ! Why, they won't even consider him for the constituency now !") .....
       Polly's father also comes to visit -- and, of course, turns out to have had a fling with Madame Dubonnet (Kiki) long ago .....
       Of course, things don't go entirely smoothly -- or rather, there are a few big bumps in the road before they do -- but everything gets sorted by the end, with a flurry of seventeen-year-olds getting engaged (all the other girls from the school aren't neglected) and everyone dancing happily ever after. It's all good fun, but it's also the lightest of fluff -- almost threadbare in just written form. But then The Boy Friend is very much a performance piece, and a musical, with dance numbers, at that, and as little as there is to it that can easily be puffed up and that works well enough on the stage.
       The lyrics are quite basic, too -- though at their best certainly work well in completely embracing the silliness of it all:

POLLY: We've got to have
We plot to have
For it's so dreary not to have
That certain thing called the Boy Friend.

POLLY and GIRLS: We scheme about
And dream about
And we've been known to scream about
That certain thing called the Boy Friend.

POLLY: He is really a necessity
If you want to get on.
And we might as well confess it, he
Is our sine qua non.

       Etc.
       The paperback edition of The Boy Friend benefits also from illustrations by the author, simple but charming enough, and the music to some of the numbers is also included, for those who want to sing along .....
       Certainly a work that should be seen and heard, rather than read, but it's easily, painlessly, and quickly gulped down in written form.

- M.A.Orthofer, 6 July 2026

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

The Boy Friend - the film:

IMDb publicity page

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Drama books

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

British composer and author Sandy Wilson lived 1924 to 2014.

- Return to top of the page -