A MAD WORLD MY MASTERS. To 19 October.

Ipswich

A MAD WORLD MY MASTERS
by Barrie Keeffe

New Wolsey Theatre To 19 October 2002
Mon-Sat 7.45pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS 01473 295900
www.wolseytheatre.co.uk
Review Timothy Ramsden 16 October

Sad decline of once-potent playwright in this messy wannabe farce.A jubilee on, Barrie Keeffe is still using a rough-and-ready style in his revision of a play originally written in 1977, to mock all that's Right in society. It was the bursting on the British scene of Italian Marxist Dario Fo's political comedies a generation back that renewed faith way out left in farce, a style previously considered bourgeois and right-wing. But this tired, platitudinous script has none of Fo's focus or critical penetration into public institutions.

A wild plot with no spine of logic doesn't become funny simply because it makes cheap gibes at royalty, business or the police. Having a police superintendent come on in a dress, or a businessman in a daft duck costume neither makes a point nor raises a smile. If this were painting, not theatre, it would be the sort any child could do better than.

On the other hand, to have one of your cast do a sanitised lapdance in Mary Archer get-up achieves an unlikely double: it makes you believe actual lapdancers must be skilled (they must be better than this hapless display), and even raises a twinge of sympathy for the fragrant Lady herself.

Charlie Folorunsho is landed with an unconvincing double, as a smooth-suited New Labour spin-doctor and his trombone-hooting patchwork dropout brother; Keeffe expects us to believe people keep mistaking one for the other. It's part of a devastating exercise in underestimating your enemy.

Such balefully simplistic, unbelievable comedy can serve a purpose: the chance to have a good laugh at the high and mighty. It may - may - even go down quite well with a suitably-disposed, and tanked up, audience late night after a rally. It went down less well with a midweek matinee audience in Ipswich. They stayed – mostly – to the end. But when your plot's incredible and your high and mighty are so low in intelligence, you're not equipping your audiences to deal with the real thing, or encouraging them to re-evaluate their views.

The cast earn their cash in terms of sweat-dropping energy: and there are some aptly crude touches: Maggie Tagney's tough granny racing around bent-double, handbag clutched firmly in front like a four wheel-drive's bull bars, Sue Holland's meandering vowels and nasal constriction on the word 'lethargic', or Kraig Thornber's weaselly tabloid exposee-journo.

But neither script nor a production by the usually deft and inventive Peter Rowe rises to a serious, or seriously comic, critique or celebration. The whole piece sinks throughout like the East London marshland where it's set.

Grandma Sprightly/Elizabeth: Maggie Tagney
Doctor O' Flaherty/Guard: Nick Haverson
Mr Smiley/Charlie: Charlie Folorunsho
Vi Sprightly: Sue Holland
Will Sprightly: Tim Welton
Ronald Sayers: Tony Turner
Faith Mycock: Harriette Ashcroft
St. John Mycock: Paul Leonard
Mr Fox: Kraig Thornber

Director: Peter Rowe
Designer: Richard Foxton
Lighting: Nick Beadle
Sound: Al Ashford
Magic consultant: Michael Fitch

2002-10-18 15:52:01