DONKEYS' YEARS. Salisbury to 16 February.
Salisbury
DONKEYS' YEARS
by Michael Frayn
Salisbury Playhouse To 16 February 2002
Runs 23hr 30min One interval
TICKETS 01722 320333
Review Timothy Ramsden 25 January
Old times bring back the laughs in a pre-Noises Off Frayn farce.Boys will be boys, and so it seems will men when re-embraced by their alma mater. Church and state, medicine and literature arrive for a twenty years on Oxbridge college re-union, with awkward recollections of friendships and tensions past, united only in continued deference to Birkett, the college Head Porter.
By act two alcohol, and farcical invention, have taken hold. It's an extended drunken scene. Frayn walks the tight rope masterfully, manoeuvring between farce's need for propositions to have consequences and drunkards' empty promises. What's more, he keeps the comedy notched up as the morning after arrives and everyone tries to recover their room, robe or reputation.
The play's passed its quarter-century mark. How quaint 1976 seems, with its radical young lecturer organising a college servants' overtime ban, to which the tradition-encrusted Head Porter defers as a matter of duty, and the desperation over tabloid revelations when there was no spin-doctor to summon on a mobile.
Joanna Read's production makes this clear, bringing the play up fresh and free of moth-balls. Read marshals the action scrupulously, never losing the logic threading the crazy consequences together. What's lacking is a sense of repose amid the manic striving. The mayhem ideally should seem effortless; here, the effort often shows.
This affects even that fine actor Amanda Harris, the female fulcrum of so many male memories. Now married to the college master, she can't avoid a female's fate in farce, ending up draped in a white towel and continually having to re-conceal herself a door for fear of being found out – or, found in an inappropriate room. There's enough desperation in Lady Driver's situation without a need to push it harder.
The same goes for other characters, though there's a sublime lack of realisation in the nerdish Snell, who missed out on college life in youth, being perpetually boarded out beyond the station where, he dionysiacally proclaims, he wasted three years in constant work.
Best of all is Nick Lumley's surgeon, blithely swaying as he hangs on to a standard lamp, letting the world takes its peculiar way around him; first-rate farce acting.
Mr S. Birkett: Michael Stroud
C.D.P.D. Headingley: Ian Targett
D.J. Buckle: Nick Lumley
K. Snell: Robert Whelan
A.V. Quine: James Duke
Rev. R.D. Sainsbury: Peter Rylands
N.O.P. Tate: Tony Boncza
W.R. Taylor: Simon Wilson
Lady Driver: Amanda Harris
Director: Joanna Read
Designer: Michael Holt
Lighting: Peter Hunter
Sound: Diane Prentice
Music: Sarah Collins
2002-02-01 12:20:11