SEE HOW THEY RUN.

London.

SEE HOW THEY RUN
by Philip King.

Duchess Theatre.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed, Fri, Sat 2.30pm.
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.

Tickets: 0870 890 1103 (booking fee £2.50 per ticket max).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 June.

In farce, the old ones really are the best.
Very good on tour this spring, Douglas Hodge’s revival of Philip King’s 1942 farce is now exemplary. No link was actually weak before, but newcomers Nancy Carroll and Tim Pigott-Smith as the vicar’s wife and her bishop-uncle are superb.

Carroll mixes human feelings – just enough to sense this former actress’s bored vicarage life - with comic style and makes a fine double-act with ex-acting partner Clive Winton (Jo Stone-Fewings immaculate as before in the role. Note he’s a lance-corporal, distinguished from the herd of privates, but not risen to that NCO hate-figure, the corporal).

Pigott-Smith is a wonder as the bishop of Lax (what undertones these names have) who enters an increasingly perplexing world where his calm authority is repeatedly ruffled. His look of puzzled amazement as things are ‘explained’ to him is a delight. From the original cast. Julie Legrand seems better than ever as Miss Skillon, perpetual spinster of this parish, somehow drunk on the cooking sherry (typically, she wouldn’t become inebriated on halfway decent stuff), a mix of judgmental sternness and string-limbed collapse.

Natalie Grady’s maid is even more delightful second-time round. She’s a mix of country cunning and rural innocence, open in her affections and dislikes, whose simplicity eventually makes all right. Grady’s puzzled looks and full-beam smiles go with a splendidly comic sequence where she uses 2 stone hotwater-bottles in an attempt to mime a message to her mistress.

There’s a wonderful faded vicarage with a view through the French Windows (what else?) of idealised rolling English fields in Tim Shortall’s set. This is a world which starts with ructions over decorating the pulpit for harvest-festival and laughs at wartime privations (mainly, army regulations and the shortage of decent drink – afternoon tea is still served as expected). It’s a land of fancy, though the number of secrets, if not actual skeletons, that get piled into a closet might suggest something disquieting behind the cheery respectability.

But mainly it shows that classic farce is a good antidote to troubles, whether packed up in an old kit-bag or not; especially when done supremely well, as here.

Ida: Natalie Grady.
Miss Skillon: Julie Legrand.
Rev Lionel Toop: Nicholas Rowe.
Penelope Toop: Nancy Carroll.
Lance-Corporal Clive Winton: Jo Stone-Fewings.
Intruder: Adrian Fear.
Bishop; of Lax: Tim Pigott-Smith.
Rev Humphrey: Nicholas Blane.
Sergeant Towers: Chris Macdonnell.
Dog: Digby.

Director: Douglas Hodge.
Designer: Tim Shortall.
Lighting: Ben Ormerod.
Sound: Fergus O’Hare.
Fight director: Malcolm Ransom.
Assistant director: Vicky Jones.

2006-07-03 00:48:04