SEE HOW THEY RUN. To 24 January.
Manchester.
SEE HOW THEY RUN
by Philip King.
Royal Exchange Theatre To 24 January 2009.
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm.
Runs 2hr One interval.
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833.
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 20 December.
A production that deserves to run and run.
A clergyman debagged if not defrocked, a German prisoner on the loose in a village where a spinster battles for moral purity against her beloved vicar’s actress-wife, opposed by the vicarage’s wily servant-girl: it’s a pot-pourri of safe English types in wartime 1942.
Author Philip King craftily assembles the ingredients that will combine to create continuing gale-force farce as the army arrives, bringing a former actor-chum of vicar’s wife Penelope Toop. They recreate their nightly onstage rows in Noel Coward’s Private Lives for a couple of knock-out curtain moments.
Sarah Frankcom’s Royal Exchange revival captures every detail. Sometimes a production’s quality is revealed before a word’s spoken. Here, the move from forties music to air-raid siren, its whooping trajectory taken up in Penelope’s offstage singing, indicates a sense of comic invention and aptness that continues throughout.
Helped by David Holmes’ lighting and Paul Wills’ set any problem the open Exchange stage with its visible entrances might present for a dramatic action incorporating sudden entries and concealments is overcome – certainly from my First Gallery seat.
Frankcom steers clearly between stereotypes and stylistic gaffes. Even Kate O’Flynn’s young vicarage servant, who takes against the local spinster then falls for the visiting actor-soldier, and who might initially seem exaggerated, soon establishes her character. Ida, as her opening tyre-puncturing venture suggests, is no village idiot but someone with an untrained yet lively mind. It’s no surprise she is able to bring about the eventual happy outcome.
Nick Caldecott’s fresh, smiling face runs alongside the conventional cadences of a stolid cleric in the making, while Laura Rogers as his wife matches the triple elegance of hairstyle, make-up and dressing-gown with a sense of joy that links with Chris Harper’s actor in army uniform. Until the final moment, when the script forbids it, Mark Edel-Hunt gives his German escapee a sense of desperation rather than obvious wartime teutonic brutality. Supremely, Alexandra Mathie makes the farce’s chief figure of fun both hilarious and credible, bloomers ascendant in her fallen state.
Excellent playing throughout, fine comic pointing and a precision that seems effortless make this a first-rate revival.
Ida: Kate O’Flynn.
Miss Skillon: Alexandra Mathie.
Rev Lionel Toop: Nick Caldecott.
Penelope Toop: Laura Rogers.
Lance-Corporal Clive Winton: Chris Harper.
The Man: Mark Edel-Hunt.
Bishop of Lax: Arthur Bostrom.
Rev Arthur Humphrey: Hugh Sachs.
Sergeant Towers: John Branwell.
Director: Sarah Frankcom.
Designer: Paul Wills.
Lighting: David Holmes.
Sound: Steve Brown.
Fights: Kate Waters.
Assistant director: Ben Fowler.
2008-12-26 01:17:11