3 HOURS AFTER MARRIAGE. To 5 April.

London.

3 HOURS AFTER MARRIAGE
by John Gay.

Union Theatre 204 Union Street SE1 0LX To 5 April 2008.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat 29 March, 5 April 3pm.
Runs 1hr 55min One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7261 9876.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 March.

Not a great discovery but an interesting one, in a lively revival.
Apparently John Gay’s poet-ally Alexander Pope had a hand in this play. If so, he was right not to give up the heroic couplets. It’s no surprise either that Gay is remembered theatrically for a single succes d’scandale.

Thirteen years after this farce, in 1729, Gay wrote books and lyrics for The Beggar’s Opera, attacking the Prime Minister and toppling Italian Opera from its pedestal in London. This earlier piece is the kind of thing young wits might try to write, having watched farces but lacking the understanding of how they tick.

There’s no plot, just piled-up incidents. The desperate comic writer’s device of funny costumes is called into play with an Egyptian mummy and a vertical crocodile. A series of comic messengers arrives, one with a stammer, and the play reaches a climax, as does its ‘heroine’, when her lover takes every opportunity at being concealed beneath the skirts of another man’s wife.

There’s plenty of knowing stuff about the theatre, with a parodied self-important critic, Sir Tremendous, and a dilettante woman writer Phoebe (whose servant perpetually bears a board on her back, ready to bend over should literary light strike her mistress).

At the action’s centre is elderly Dr Fossile, whose age and predilection for a museum of ‘curiosities’ contrasts his inefficacy in his new-married state. As he takes his mulch-food, and attends unlikely-named rich patients, his appetite for his new wife Mrs Townley is distinctly suppressed. Meanwhile, within the title’s time-limit, two suitors whose names confirm the play’s artifices seek to evade the husband and blank-out each other to ensure she indeed enjoys the pleasures of the town.

Doubtless the authors giggled a lot at their play’s individual devices. And there’s an historical interest in their stratagems (maybe the 22nd century will similarly take to the Private Eye-derived Mrs Wilson’s Diary or Anyone for Dennis).

It’s fortunate that Blanche McIntyre’s the director to rediscover the piece. Ever inventive and lively, and alive to the script’s potential, McIntyre marshals a lively if rough-hewn cast in a sharply humorous style that captures the play’s sense of fun and daring.

Fossile: Steven Blake.
Plotwell: Dan Ford.
Underplot: Mark Leipacher.
Mrs Townley: Rebecca McKinnis.
Sir Tremendous: Jonathan Peck.
Phoebe Clinker: Penny Scott-Andrews.
Sarsnet: Tegwen Tucker.

Director: Blanche McIntyre.
Designers: Chloe Ireland, Charlotte McBrearty.
Lighting: Phil Spencer Hunter.
Music: Darren Scott.
Costume: Eva Le Blanc.

2008-03-17 13:00:57