Jane and Paul | Early Beatle history Jane Asher (19)

Jane Asher hugs a big bouquet as she reads a good luck message after her first night performance in Cleo. 🌸

Teenage fans pack the theatre by John Coe.

"Miss Asher's boy friend, Beatle Paul McCartney, did not turn up for the premiere, at the Little Theatre, as had been expected. But scores of teenagers did, whispering and wondering

where their idol was. I have never seen the Little

Theatre so full. The House Full boards were out long before the time of performance. Miss Asher's TV reputation and her friendship for Paul have ensured good houses for the run. Mr. Ken Cowley, the Corporation's entertainments manager, said last night that advance bookings

were "very heavy.”

STAYED ON

After the show, while many teenagers stayed on in the hope of meeting Jane, Miss Asher was declining backstage to say whether she had received from Paul a first night good wishes telegram. But there is very little doubt in the minds of the rest of the cast of "Cleo" that he will be coming to Bristol sometime during the three weeks the play is on. 

Little Theatre, Bristol: “Cleo,” by Frank Marcus.

Cleo is an amoral 17 year old, a rebel against convention, a girl who flits from one assignation to another. We find her in a coffee-bar with a boy barely out of knee pants, in an attic studio with a coloured man, in a bachelor flat with a divorced photographer who, takes pictures of models and so on. 

In the words of the singing compere little Cleo is always hoping the next one will be better than the last. The play is sad and funny but turn, and, of course, episodic. But it is also unusual and therein lies its attraction; that and the presence of Jane Asher. A programme note calls it “an opposite comment on the attitude of present-day teenagers to sex, morals, environment — and life in general.” What in fact Mr Marcus has done is to give us a faithful picture of an uninhibited type of youngster. A girl who is a product of a broken home, who has no roots and is determined to flaunt her independence at all costs.

The play sets a lively place to start with, and we warm to it and Cleo, but the flat cliches begin to get tiresome, and after all the interval, it drags and ones interest tends to sag the more repetitive the episodes become. 

The best scene of all of Cleo’s meeting with the divorced photographer, for is written with real insight into character. Here is a man, basically unsure of himself, who yearns for the experience that an ardent youngster alone can give him. This was the only time the play became really moving. The world premiere brought a full house of teenagers and their parents, all anxious to see Miss Asher for the first time in the live theatre.

She did not disappoint them, for the 19 year old actress, on stage without a break for 2 hours, gave a performance that was at the once completely assured and intuitively perceptive. In Val Mal’s production for Bristol Old Vic, the linking passages are played by Norman Beaton and sung by Sol Raye. It is a tuneful arrangement. James Cossins is excellent as the photographer, Max and Frank Berrie makes the most of amusing lines as TV actor auditioning for a live theatre part. Audience reaction was strong and sympathetic, there being nine “curtains.”— "

John Coe. Twenty-nine Evening Post, November 10th 1965.