HORSE & CARRIAGE by Feydeau/Desvallieres. West Yorkshire Playhouse to 1 December
Leeds
HORSE & CARRIAGE
by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres Adapted by Graeme Garden
Quarry Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse To 1 December 2001
Runs 2hr 45min Two intervals
TICKETS 0113 213 7700
Review Timothy Ramsden 17 November
Lots of energy, great production values, good cast - some laughs."Love and marriage, Go together like a horse and carriage," went a 1950s song whose lyricist presumably hadn't come across Feydeau and Desvallieres' Le Mariage de Barillon, in which folks get yoked and annulled with increasing rapidity.
Things go wrong for middle-aged Barillon just as he's about to become spliced to 18 year old Virginie. She loves young Patrice, who's suicidal because he can't have her. Except Adrian McLoughlin's alcoholic clerk keeps entering the wrong names on documents, so Barillon ends up wedding his prospective mother-in-law.
And her previous husband is less dead than she thought. Nor does it help that, the night before the civic wedding ceremony, Barillon drunkenly challenged the Mayor to a duel. As if that weren't enough…
But of course it is enough. What limits Deborah Norton's lively production is its determination to add on more and more. Things go wrong, production-wise, before the play starts when we're treated to Barillon's frolicsome stag night. Cue can-can and champagne, but though the sequence earns a round of applause it instils a sense that bourgeois values are to be winked at. Yet the play's characters are full of regard for propriety. It may run right through, as in Des McAleer's comically dignified country relative with his perplexity at Parisian ways, or be a source of guilt to the backsliding, such as Topeau, Adrian McLoughlin's toper of a town-hall menial. But, mixed with Catholicism, it produces the strict moral code everyone acknowledges.
When this breezes by in a flurry of shouting, pratfalls, funny props and comically bared body parts, the farcical motor is lost. Isolated comic moments remain. Griff Rhys Jones exploits his vocabulary of facial astonishment and vocal spleen, but should have been encouraged to vary some of his gale force tirades. Alison Steadman's monster mother-in-law is a delight, though tighter direction could have helped the moments when she has nothing to do but parade the stage in waltz-time.
There's a strong cast; John Nettleton's Mayor is a triumph of benign officialdom. It works, more or less. But it could have worked more with less thrown in.
Zizi/Louisette: Annette McLaughlin
Flameche: Stephen Finegold
Topeau: Adrian McLoughlin
Brigot: Des McAleer
Barillon: Griff Rhys Jones
Patrice: Eliot Giuralarocca
Virginie: Diana Morrison
Madame Jambart: Alison Steadman
Planturel: John Nettleton
Captain Emile: Geoffrey McGivern
Director: Deborah Norton
Designer: Tim Reed
Lighting: Adam Silverman
Sound: Mic Pool
Music: Diana Morrison
Choreographer: Gavin Lee
Fight Director: Malcolm Ransom
2001-11-18 03:00:47