By, John Nathan
2 min read
I wonder if, when he decided to revive this old-school farce, the Chocolate Factory’s artistic director David Babani was looking to provide some old-fashioned escapism for these times of recession, depression and repossession?
Not that Ben Travers’s knockabout comedy needed the excuse of escapism to be a hit when it first appeared at the Aldwych Theatre in 1926. The Wall Street Crash was still three years away. But what was very funny then — watching a gallery of mainly posh English caricatures getting caught up in a humiliating melee of slapstick and tickle — is only occasionally very funny now.
Fitfully enjoyable though the play is in the hands of a terrific cast and expert director Terry Johnson, this revival only briefly delivers the hilarity-fest promised by Travers’s laborious set-up.
The newly married Gerald Popkiss has arrived sans wife and mother-in-law at his holiday home where a pyjama-clad young woman has sought refuge from her fierce German stepfather, Putz — played by Nick Bramble as a sort of pre-Nazi disciplinarian — who vants, sorry, wants to punish his step-daughter for disobeying orders.
Popkiss cannot help but succumb to selfless instincts and offer this extremely attractive damsel in distress the sanctuary of his bedroom. Whether Lynda Baron’s no-nonsense housekeeper (the object of some unfunny fat jokes) would see it that way or, worse, his strict sister-in-law Gertrude (Sarah Woodward), he would rather not find out.
What is at stake here is reputation, a thing, as Shakespeare put it, that is “oft got without merit, and lost without deserving” — though for Popkiss, still worth fighting for. So to keep the damsel (Kelley Shirley) under wraps, Popkiss recruits Edward Baker-Duly’s caddish Clive and Gertrude’s mouse of a spouse Harold (Mark Hadfield).
The evening builds from the mildly amusing to the hysterically funny with the unexpected arrival of Gertrude, from whom Gerald hides the presence of her husband by ramming the evidence — a golf club — down his trousers. Now, I like a well-turned one-liner as much as anyone. I would bow to Neil Simon before any god. But there is, I submit, nothing in this world funnier than a golf club down the trousers.
And then an extraordinary thing happens. This farce falls flat. It happens with the arrival of Alan Thompson’s bluff Admiral, a needless cliché in a cast of caricatures, and one which does little to serve the already shaky plot and whose presence drains the evening of laughter.
It is a fragile thing, humour. Once lost it is almost impossible to get back. Not even with the return of Baker-Duly’s Clive (a brilliant performance that has something dangerous about it — if Jim Carrey ever plays an English toff it won’t be far off Baker–Duly’s).
Up until the Admiral, I would have bet that co-producer Sonia Friedman had found a comedy to match her 2007 revival of Boeing-Boeing. As it is, the evening still has the energy to distract from recession blues. And with Babani and Friedman’s backing, a West End transfer must still be on the cards.
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