SEE HOW THEY RUN. To 8 April.
Tour
SEE HOW THEY RUN
by Philip King
Tour to 8 April 2006
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 March at Richmond Theatre
How to get your vicars in a twist.
Now, as in their heyday, farces play upon the combination of expectation and surprise. It’s not whether every nook and cranny of the realistic set (here a 1942 vicarage of near-baronial proportions) will be exploited in the comic action, but how. Not whether clothes will go missing, but why.
So we know Julie Legrand’s strict spinster will at some point reveal a libidinous inner-self, that the escaped German prisoner-of-war whose footsteps to the vicarage are virtually plotted in the favourite device of a one-sided telephone-call, will turn up as a menacing complication to an action already well-stocked with possibilities: a vicar’s wife who’s also a bishop’s daughter and a former actress, her soldier-friend who acted with her, a daffy maid besotted with this same soldier. And the usual innocent clergymen.
Philip King’s famous wartime farce neatly plays off audience expectations, as actor-turned-soldier Clive Winton speaks with foreboding about how plans go horridly wrong in comedies, or the final curtain exploits the plot’s absurd complexity.
Whether or not the old ones are always the best, this is certainly among the best of the old ones. Energetic, fresh and furious, King’s script still holds to the conventions and suppositions of the style and time. This revival might even start a resurgence of interest in his work like that of slightly earlier farceur Ben Travers in the 1970s.
As a production it could hardly be bettered. Director Douglas Hodge marshals pace and incident with fine discrimination (consider how several characters talking in the middle of the action keep breaking off to direct others involved in a mad chase. It’s a superb pattern of expectation and variation).
Hodge’s A-grade cast carries off verbal and physical details with serious manner and lightness of playing. Among them, Natalie Grady’s maid, a mix of rural simplicity and shrewdness, is excellently-judged while Jo Stone-Fewings is outstanding in his crisp manner and verbal precision. His hiding and bouncing back into view on Ida’s entrances and exits are a plot idiocy King, again, plays on. But Stone-Fewings is so funny, the only thing to say is, ‘Let him bounce again.’
Ida: Natalie Grady
Miss Skillon: Julie Legrand
Rev Lionel Toop: Simon Wilson
Penelope Toop: Hattie Morahan
Lance-Corporal Clive Winton: Jo Stone-Fewings
Intruder: Adrian Fear
Bishop of Lax: Benjamin Whitrow
Rev Humphrey: Nicholas Blane
Sergeant Towers: Chris Macdonnell
Director: Douglas Hodge
Designer: Tim Shortall
Lighting: Ben Ormerod
Sound: John A Leonard
Fight director: Malcolm Ransom
Assistant director: Vicky Jones
2006-03-02 02:43:59