DONKEYS' YEARS.
London.
DONKEYS’ YEARS
by Michael Frayn.
Comedy Theatre.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Tue & Sat 3pm.
Audio-described 11 July.
BSL Signed 25 July.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 060 6637 (£2.50 transaction fee).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 May.
A West End delight.
At the end of Michael Frayn’s 1977 comedy the sole woman character declares herself in favour of formality. By when she’s been hiding behind curtains, running around in towels and using a convenient newspaper to pass herself off as a bearded Welshman. Around her is a doctor with a wounded eye, a government minister with a wrecked back, trousers round his ankles and shaving foam spread across his upper half. And more. Formality hardly seems the order of the day.
Or the weekend, for this is a 25-year on minor Oxbridge college reunion where the brightish young things of the early fifties gather. Now in their forties, they’re a wide generation apart from young academic Bill Taylor urging the college servant to industrial action. Camp, morose, nostalgic, the old boys coalesce as drink submerges personality clashes. And they gather an unremembered outsider who, 25 years late, joins his generation’s in-crowd with a sudden rush of middle-aged youthfulness.
Jeremy Sams’ fast-moving production (Salisbury’s 2002 revival ran 20 minutes longer) heightens the increasingly farcical proceedings as the swiftly-introduced characters, the 30-somethings of the Beatles era, just beyond touch with the ‘sixties’, clubbably reassure each other neither they nor the college has changed.
All remember the amatory, and currently benighted, woman now married to the knighted, and currently absent, college head. Samantha Bond makes a growing comedy of Lady Driver’s nervously compulsive mannerisms when preparing to meet an old flame and of her subsequent confusion.
Meanwhile the men indulge in drink and horseplay, taking to it more than readily; an English Establishment full of overgrown students with only those on the fringes of authority displaying any sober steadiness. Mark Addy builds beautifully from an unassertive beginning to a stampeding roar, while James Dreyfus makes the malign Quine a seriously comic character.
Michael Simkins and Jonathan Coy show the straight-men can be as funny as anyone, while David Haig’s style, with its forceful precision, adapts excellently to comedy. Against the mayhem, Edward Petherbridge’s Mr Birkett, the ever-suave College Head Porter, is a model of unfazed calm. This is a thoughtful, yet often hilarious evening.
Mr S Birkitt: Edward Petherbridge.
C D P B Headingley MA MP: David Haig.
D J Buckle MB FRCS: Michael Simkins.
K Snell MA: Mark Addy.
A V Quine BA: James Dreyfus.
Rev R D Sainsbury MA: Michael Fitzgerald.
N O P Tate MA: Jonathan Coy.
W R Taylor MA PhD: Chris Moran.
Lady Driver MA: Samantha Bond.
Director: Jeremy Sams.
Designer: Peter McKintosh.
Lighting: Howard Harrison.
Sound: John Leonard.
2006-05-12 03:20:54