ROOKERY NOOK To 20 June.
London.
ROOKERY NOOK
by Ben Travers.
Menier Chocolate Factory 53 Southwark Street SE1 1RU To 20 June 2009.
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7907 7060 (£2 transaction fee).
www.menierchocolatefactory.com (no booking fee).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 May.
Always amusing, sometimes funny and momentarily hilarious.
This production is very good. A few weeks in it will be better. When it transfers to the West End, it will be better than ever. Which is good going; Ben Travers penned his farces (this one in 1926) for a team resident at the Aldwych Theatre. Audiences knew what to expect from each actor, whose type took on different names in successive Travers scripts.
And people brought their expectations of social behaviour, their sense of what was daring, naughty but nice or out-of-bounds. With their forceful females to be outwitted by chaps’ natural desires when a gal’s in the offing, these farces were an upmarket version of the seaside postcard.
Nowadays, when it takes an act of recall to realise a distressed female and two lively young men slept in different bedrooms, it’s hard to find much humour in the shaking of 1920s taboos. Or in flagseller Poppy, the provocative young woman who emerges in front of affronted matrons instead of demure young Rhoda, whose funnily foreign stepfather etc.
Mark Hadfield is excellent as put-upon husband Harold, bouncing up and down, losing himself in a maze of monosyllables or letting his features catalogue his confusions and timidity. And Edward Baker-Duly excels as suave Clive Popkiss, who contrives and manipulates and usually finds a way out of the latest unexpected dilemma.
Neil Stuke as his brother mixes enthusiastically errant desire with perplexity under stress. On the side of propriety are more limited stereotypes, respectable cleaning-woman Mrs Leverett (Lynda Baron, formidable) and Sarah Woodward’s maliciously proper Mrs Twine.
Terry Johnson’s production has them all leaping, gaping and mugging like mad, throwing in an implied cat and dog as well, though it could pick up pace and rat-a-tat delivery at times.
Occasionally hilarity hits home, but more often the effort’s still showing through. Maybe it must, without the original cast whose stage personae were the characters. Or maybe it will hit the groove with time, and a transfer to somewhere more like the Aldwych birth-place. After all, intimate, open-stages like the Menier were never intended for this most artificial of dramatic genres.
Gertrude Twine: Sarah Woodward.
Mrs Leverett: Lynda Baron.
Harold Twine: Mark Hadfield.
Clive Popkiss: Edward Baker-Duly.
Gerald Popkiss: Neil Stuke.
Rhoda Marley: Kellie Shirley.
Putz: Nick Brimble.
Admiral Juddy: Alan Thompson.
Poppy Dickey: Victoria Yeates.
Clara Popkiss: Clare Wilkie.
Mrs Possett: Venetia Barrett.
Director: Terry Johnson.
Designer/Costume: Tim Shortall.
Lighting: Jason Taylor.
Sound: David Ogilvy.
Dialect coach: Penny Dyer.
Assistant director: Katie McAleese.
2009-05-04 01:53:50