MONKEY'S UNCLE
Richmond
MONKEY’S UNCLE
by David Lewis
Orange Tree Theatre
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS: 0208 940 3633
www.orangetreetheatre.c
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 October
Paris. The Theatre. Glamour. L’Amour. Fun for the audience, hard work for the characters.
A century ago, French farce-writer Feydeau had a stock dramatic structure. A bourgeois household, disrupted by extra-marital desires, all turn up in the same hotel; desperate efforts at concealments and explanations ensue, before everyone’s home again, picking up the reigns of respectability.
David Lewis starts out showing how farce links to the farceur’s life as Feydeau’s belle époque existence becomes like one of his plots. And the opening is from a Feydeau farce. By the time that’s revealed, we’ve followed the characters into one of Feydeau’s hotels. His doctor friend Benoit is after police inspector, and amateur farmyard-impressionist, Habillot’s slow-witted, luscious-looking wife. Trousers are not dropped, but voluntarily removed en masse. And it becomes clear Feydeau’s true love is his plays, scripts he collects and embraces lovingly.
When the action returns to domesticity, it’s to today’s distinctly un-belle epoch, Feydeau replaced by successful sitcom writer George. Comic marital tiffs transform into an emotionally-distressing separation while serious socialist playwright Louis, who claims Georges nicked his ideas, becomes jealous dramatist David, resentful of George’s commercial success and suggesting the title Monkey’s Uncle for a play about Feydeau.
Though this act’s slower-paced, time and character transformations maintain a dazzling whirl worthy of Stoppard or Michael Frayn. The smiling French Maid becomes a sullen au pair (as a mere servant, she retains her near-anonymous, single-name identity), the stylish Cecile become the clomping Christine and Amanda Royle’s farcical Mme Feydeau deepens into the modern wife Anne, tearing a loaf of bread in fury rather than fun. The action builds to a sublime moment, reinventing one of the oldest tricks in the sex-farce book, to produce an extended look of absolute shock on David Leonard’s face as the creator of comic action finds himself taken unawares.
Leonard’s utter shock is splendid here, as he is throughout, and as is everyone in Sam Walters’ exemplary production. It works especially well at the Orange Tree, exploiting Walters’ invention of the ‘visual sound effect’, solving staging problems in-the-round by stage management operating a battery of tiny sound-effect doors and other implements in full audience view. Take a bow, stage management.
Georges Feydeau/George: David Leonard
Marianne Feydeau/Anne: Amanda Royle
Benoit Didier/Ben: Stuart Fox
Louis Levasseur/David: Paul Kemp
Cecile Habillot/Christine: Beth Cordingly
Alphonse Habillot/Alan: Alister Cameron
Yvette: Samantha Dowson
Director: Sam Walters
Designer: Vicki Fifield
Lighting: Kevin Leach
Assistant directors: Imogen Bond, Amy Hodge
2005-10-17 09:42:58