COME BLOW YOUR HORN. To 25 June.
Manchester
COME BLOW YOUR HORN
by Neil Simon
Royal Exchange Theatre To 25 June 2005
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Audio-described 11 June 4pm
Post-show discussion 23 June
Runs 2hr 30min Two intervals
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 May
A good time for the audience and a happy ending for the people in Neil Simon's comedy.Though Neil Simon's written more reflective comedies, notably his autobio-trilogy, and ones with more scope, this 1961 success his first Broadway comedy has the fresh, even naïve, attraction of a top writer's early work, its jokes and comic situations devised with carefree, if artful, ingenuity. Yet, for all its reflection of a new, Kennedy-inspired youth era coming in, there's a conventional moral, comforting or depressing according to taste. You can leave your family, but they won't leave you alone.
That's what Alan, freewheeling elder son of the plastic-fruit manufacturing Baker family, discovers. At first he's happy to have nerdy young brother and conscientious worker Buddy join him in girl-getting bachelor paradise. But family commitment beckons for Alan as the play proceeds. The one-liners come so fast, the characters are so energetically themselves, it's easy to miss the way characters' arrivals and returns are more convenient than inevitable in arriving at this conclusion.
There's no weak link in Jacob Murray's lively production. But there are 3 particularly strong ones. Malcolm Rennie's Jewish father, wedded to the fake fruit business, can't see his frustration's born from an inability to understand living beings like his sons. Equally obsessed, with matriarchal worries, the lads' mother is a gift for the splendid Amanda Boxer, possessing the apartment at every entry, providing a virtuoso solo under attack from her son's telephone. Alone, unable to find a pencil (a whole crop emerges with comic suddenness later on), she's tormented by multiple messages, increasingly distorted as her memory tumbles into overdrive.
Then there's Jamie Glover's Alan, funny because he's so serious. Glover's face is set, his brow thoughtful, the voice confident or striving to explain. Never more than with Connie, the sensible woman he'll surely marry, as opposed to the trendy airhead wannabe (as they didn't say in the sixties) from the apartment upstairs. When the family's relocated themselves piecemeal to plug up Alan's independence it's inevitable the time to settle down has come and the choice Connie offered Alan early on bed or wed comes her way in the end. A happy ending, I think it's called.
Alan Baker: Jamie Glover
Peggy Evans: Lucy Chalkley
Buddy Baker: Andrew Langtree
Mr Baker: Malcolm Rennie
Connie Dayton: Sarah-Louise Young
Mrs Baker: Amanda Boxer
Director: Jacob Murray
Designer: Di Seymour
Lighting: Richard Owen
Sound: Steve Brown/Gerry Marsden
Dialects: Lise Olson
2005-05-28 12:13:40