ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. To 25 November.
Nottingham/Worthing
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE
by Joseph Kesselring
Theatre Royal Nottingham To 11 November
Mon to Fri 7.30pm, Sat 8.00pm, Mat Wed 2pm & Sat 4pm
then Connaught Theatre Worthing 20-25 November 2006
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2pm
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 0115 989 5555
www.royalcentre-nottingham.co.uk (Nottingham)
01903 206206
www.worthingtheatres.co.uk (Worthing)
Review: Alan Geary 8 November 2006
An un-ambitious production with no new insights, but it’s fun all the same.
The trouble with Robin Herford’s new production of this early forties classic is that it doesn’t break new ground and isn’t even trying to. Herford presents it straight, without attempting to dig under its surface for new insights; it stays a period piece.
Michael Holt’s straightforward and realistic set gives us the standard five doors said to be necessary for farce (if you count a window through which there’s much coming and going) but it fails to exploit the comic potentiality of an anachronistically creepy house plonked in the middle of twentieth-century Brooklyn.
Lack of ambition is the major problem. But another is that the best lines in the play, possibly through mistiming by the likes of Mortimer (Ian Targett) or Jonathan (Damian Myerscough), don’t get the laughs. Most of the fun comes from the action, which speeds up after the break.
Although Targett manages Mortimer’s double-takes reasonably well, he isn’t sufficiently light on his feet for the frantic bits and his voice is too rasping for the part. (He seemed a trifle too old for Elaine, successfully understudied by Catherine McCullogh, on this particular night.)
But there’s a lot to enjoy. Aunts Abby and Martha (Louise Jameson and Sherrie Hewson respectively) are splendid. Hewson possibly over-does Martha’s scuttling walk, with her cracked laugh the more obviously barking of the two. Jameson, taller, flirtatious, and good-looking under all that lace, has an intelligent sense of humour that contrasts nicely with her insanity.
A craggily handsome Robin Bowerman does the shrewd worldliness of clergyman Harper as well as the pompous incompetence of Lieutenant Rooney superbly.
Bald and ridiculously tall, with a plastic surgery botch-up for a face, Myerscough’s Jonathan makes a comic contrast to the diminutive Einstein. Wayne Sleep, in the latter role, has an accent that wanders dangerously between Goebbels and Peter Lorre via South London, but he amuses nevertheless.
And having said that too many of the best lines don’t get through, at least one does; it comes from Elaine: “And if you think you’re going to get out of marrying me by pretending to be insane you’re crazy!”
Abby: Louise Jameson
Harper/Rooney: Robin Bowerman
Teddy: Quinn Patrick
Brophy: Moray Treadwell
Klein: Asa Joel
Martha: Sherrie Hewson
Elaine: Andrea Green
Mortimer: Ian Targett
Gibbs/Witherspoon: Peter Laird
Jonathan: Damian Myerscough
Einstein: Wayne Sleep
O’Hara: Gerard Gilroy
Understudies: Catherine McCulloch/Judith Rae/Andrew P Stephen/Peter Yapp
Director: Robin Herford
Designer: Michael Holt
Lighting: Matt Drury
2006-11-10 00:46:59