MAKING DICKIE HAPPY. To 3 October.

London

MAKING DICKIE HAPPY
by Jeremy Kingston

Rosemary Branch Theatre To 3 October 2004
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Sun 6pm
Runs 2hr One interval

TICKETS: 020 7704 6665
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 September

Wit and style in a handsome, well-paced production.The dark chamber of the Rosemary Branch seems to have expanded into the creamy affluence of a 1920s Devon hotel lounge to match the sophisticated, elegant wit of Jeremy Kingston's look at the gay monde headed by Dickie' Mountbatten, royal by lineage, and Noel Coward, imperial in manner.

Holidaying with their slick-hair boyfriends, they enter and leave as the turn of elegant conversation requires. Meanwhile these companions, less prominent characters both, eye up the waiter, whose perfect poise combines subservience of behaviour with superiority of demeanour to suggest a youthfully subversive scion of the house of Jeeves.

There's no pretence of realism the prop piano which several characters strum ensures that. Except for the sole female character: handbag-toting, ever so slightly anguished tec writer Agatha Christie. Padding around solo, without the protective glaze of ironic sophistication, she's outraged by Dickie. Not his behaviour with the boys, perfectly proper throughout (this man is going to run a war in Burma and organise India's independence, gaining Gandhi's respect in the process).

No, it's the plot he offers her for a novel, which breaks every convention between mystery writer and reader. And whether any Dickie, upper case or lower, ever gets happy, betrayal's in the air. Mountbatten senior, Britain's First Sea Lord, had to change his name from its Germanic original in 1914; sounding Teutonic in the Great War made one seem unreliable. His father thus mistrusted by the nation, Dickie now joins the bright, glad confident generation of the famous let down by their lovers.

All in a world where people still seek harmony. Agatha once put Debussy in his place by demanding music resolve concordantly; at a moment of emotional fury Noel bangs the piano keyboard mercilessly before thinning the chords into a pert music-hall song.

It's performed with alacrity and style, if not universal subtlety and variation. Yet Wildi's Agatha successfully suggests other concerns within, as if far away on an evidence trail like her fictional sleuth Poirot, while Robert Forknall's Noel has a dashing authority that powers his moment of emotional vulnerability. Dashed jolly stuff all round, I'd say.

Tono: David Peto
Cyril: Rob Pomfret
Agatha Christie: Caroline Wildi
Noel Coward: Robert Forknall
Dickie Mountbatten: Hywel John
J-Boy: Matt Reeves

Director: Robert Gillespie
Designer/Costume: Kevin Freeman
Lighting: Stephen Ley

2004-09-16 10:32:22