The Jewish Chronicle
Review: London Assurance
Anti-Jewish pitfalls are avoided in this riotous romp
March 18, 2010 12:32
By, John Nathan
1 min read
Anti-Jewish pitfalls are avoided in this riotous romp
March 18, 2010 12:32ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
Has there ever been a neater, wittier, sidestepping of Victorian anti-semitism? I doubt it. To reveal exactly how director Nicholas Hytner handles the money-lender Solomon Isaacs in Dion Boucicault's 1841 comedy would be to sour a moment that is as sweet as it is satisfying.
It arrives towards the end of this two-hour, forty-minute play (written when the Dublin-born Boucicault was just 21) which fancies itself as a satire, but is actually a bit of a romp. Its hero is Simon Russell Beale's 57-year-old, Sir Harcourt Courtly, Bart, a London fop who is intent on marrying Grace (Michelle Terry) the niece of a country squire (Mark Addy) to bolster his fortune. At the squire's manor Harcourt is distracted by the arrival of Fiona Shaw's gloriously horsey Lady Gay Spanker, a crop-wielding, fox hunting eccentric.
Nearly everyone is after someone - either off stage or on. Spanker chases foxes, Harcourt chases Spanker, Harcourt's son Charles (Paul Ready) chases Grace, Charles is being chased by Solomon Isaacs (for his debts), and at one point everyone is chased around the grounds by Spanker's senile, blunderbuss-wielding husband Adolphus, played by Richard Briers, who vibrates like a tuning fork when his blood is up.
And broad though the humour is, Shaw as the thigh-slapping Spanker and Beale as the twinkle-toed Courtly still find the time to act, as opposed to merely performing. With every insult about Courtly's age, Beale more often opts for a dignified pause than a much less funny cry of anguish, while Shaw reveals a humane if mischievous heart to a role that would otherwise be much more caricature than character.
But what really elevates this evening are the moments of humour that Hytner's cast find between Boucicault's original lines and the new lines by playwright Richard Bean who Hytner commissioned to punch up the script.
Shaw's Spanker could have had someone's eye out, the way she flings that crop of hers. And when, as he stalks her, Beale's Harcourt inhales some Portuguese smelling salts for Dutch courage, it takes a cushion to hide the latest example of theatrical Viagra.
Still funnier is the after-dinner dance and Harcourt's cry of "clear the floor" followed by his pirouettes and ballet poses. Not since Ricky Gervais's David Brent has bad dancing been so good.
Then there is that sidestepping in the final act, just before the arrival of the aforementioned Isaacs for which Bean, not Boucicault, has written a chain reaction of snide comments, nods, winks and knowing asides about Mr Isaacs's ethnicity. "He comes from the East, you know". "What, Cheltenham?"
So how is anti-Semitism avoided? Go and see. But when Sam Mendes, who was in the audience for this press night, directed the play in 1989, it featured a false nose. Nicholas Hytner's production does not. (Tel: 020 7452 3000)