LOVE IN A MAZE. To 27 July.

Newbury

LOVE IN A MAZE
by Dion Boucicault

Watermill Theatre To 27th July 2002
Mon-Sat 7.30 Mat Thur & Sat 2.30pm, except 27 July at 1.30pm and 6.30pm
Runs 2hr One interval

TICKETS 01635 46044
Review Ian Willox 10th June

Love In A Maze contains everything you might want in a good night out at the theatre.Director Timothy Sheader has taken Boucicault’s Love In A Maze, last performed over 150 years ago, and through careful editing and swashbuckling direction, has created a very, very funny romantic comedy.

Irish playwright, actor and impresario Dion Boucicault, the most commercially successful dramatist of the nineteenth century British and American theatre, took a practical view of his career: “I can spin out these rough-and-tumble dramas as a hen lays eggs. It’s a degrading occupation, but more money has been made out of guano than out of poetry”.

Boucicault’s abilities first show themselves in the plot – an inversion of the traditional boy meets girl, after 5 acts of trials and tribulations marrying and living happily ever after. Rupert and Lucy are just married when the play starts. But only to please their beloved uncle Sir Abel Buckethorne. The scheming Lord Minever pretends friendship to Rupert and woos Lucy, in the hope of annulling the marriage. He is satisfyingly humiliated and confounded.

The real joy of the play is in the language. Timothy Sheader has updated the setting from the late seventeenth century to the 1920s and embellished it with the songs of Noel Coward. It works. The concerns and proprieties of the 1920s seem to mesh perfectly with those of the play. The references to Coward highlight and compliment the wit of Boucicault’s dialogue.

This is no clever, polite recreation. It is a rollicking good romp, packed with one liners and sight gags, underlined with nicely judged romances (there are three happy couples by the end) and without a longuer in sight. The young lovers give affecting performances but are outshone by Robert Benfield's constant comic invention as Sir Toby Nettletop – repressed as only an English country gentleman thwarted in love can be – and Nick Caldecott as Lord Minever, who is positively French in his urbane English amorality.

The audience loved every moment and by the final promenade part of the performance (an actual maze outside the theatre) were joining in the songs uninvited, shedding a tear for the lovers and applauding the villain’s downfall.

Lady Aurora Fullalove: Eileen Battye
Sir Toby Nettletop: Robert Benfield
Lord Minever: Nick Caldecott
Faith: Claire Carrie
Sir Abel Buckethorne: Sam Dastor
Mrs Lucy Buckethorne: Cate Debenham Taylor
Mopus: Paul Harvard
Colonel Rupert Buckethorne: Martin Hutson

Director: Timothy Sheader
Designer: Philip Witcomb
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick
Musical Director: Philip Bateman
Choreography: Sam Spencer-Lane

2002-06-12 06:10:28