GOLDSMITH BEATEN LIGHT AS AIR
Nice symmetry in Tom Littler’s resolution to set Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy within the Wodehousian Jazz Age: the Georgians, with their boozy monarchs and coffe-house sarcasms, have been mischievous spirits earlier than Queen Victoria and Dickens arrived to demand decorum. So right here’s a curmudgeonly husband with a bossy and flighty spouse, planning matches for his or her younger with blended outcomes. Here’s an elopement, a minxy insurgent, and a callow Woosterish public schoolboy who can’t relate to his personal class of lady however solely to barmaids , so a intelligent lady should pose as one to internet him. And that’s earlier than you get to the purloined jewel field without end falling into the improper arms: a transparent forerunner of Wodehouse’s stolen silver cow-creamer.
It matches fantastically within the cosy panelled and galleried theatre, swagged with Christmas decorations as we collect intimately round and above the lounge , the inn and the lounge mistaken for an inn. (If ever Littler decides to programme a play set in a desert or spaceship his designers may have a extra troublesome job than Neil Irish and Anett Black did with this one).
But the pleasures of this rumbustious manufacturing go deeper. David Horovitch and Greta Scacchi are as high quality as you’d count on, magnificently explosive at occasions; Tanya Reynolds is a fascinating Kate, severe when wanted and an entire mistress of the traditional drop-hanky-bend-and-snap as recomended centuries later in Legally Blonde. Sabrina Bartlett is a girlish Constance with a fire-engine shriek; Guy Hughes’ Tony Lumpkin is an unusually likeable padded-weskit of a country, because the younger squire who rightly prefers Bet Bouncer’s “cheeks as red as a pulpit cushion” down the pub, to the specter of marrying his extra polished cousin. He sings to his ukelele within the Two Pigeons public bar , pleasingly peopled with a neighborhood refrain of eight or 9 revellers. And Richard Derrington makes he very, very most of Diggory the dishevelled manservant, doddering for England with each transfer upsetting ripples of enjoyment.
But two essential issues shine. One is that every one the forged are completely at residence with the advanced 18c prose and its that means: it journeys off their tongues as pure as respiration. And that may be more durable than talking Shakespeare: extra rat-a-tat rhythms, no restful iambics. If this present wasn’t nearly bought out I might urge all Eng Lit academics to convey recalcitrant pupils who whine for recognizability to point out them simply how comfy 250- year- previous expressions can really feel.
The different essential advantage is is within the bodily comedy and “business”. Julia Cave is credited for motion path, and I can’t converse extremely sufficient of Scacchi’s Martini-and-olive play, the insurgent niece’s mastery of a riding-crop, Horovitch’s finely judged throwing of a stilton cheese, Kate’s very suggestive sharpening of the gramophone horn, an excellent grape-catch from Freddie Fox, and Diggory’s triple brolly-muff-and-handbag hurl. Or of all the peerlessly judged table-leaping, couch flopping, suitcase-dragging work and moments of manic panic and baffled stasis, as when Freddie Fox is caught on a chair clutching, for no keen cause, a tiny Twenties jewelled purse.
Indeed all of the laddish exchanges , banterings and irritations between the younger males – Fox and Robert Mountford – are pulsing with life. And I’ve by no means seen Fox earlier than in such broad comedy, and lengthy for him to do extra: earlier than: his helpless bespectacled shyness spherical Kate, his 180 diploma flip to leering-down to the supposed barmaid, his puppyish overconfidence and humiliated horror are all spot-on: exaggerated simply to the purpose the place comedy shades into wincing affectionate sympathy.
It is altogether the primary of the Christmas treats, ended with a high quality jazz dance curtain name, and for all these causes its fifth mouse is the hardly ever deployed Christmouse, dancing on the cat’s social gathering squeaker…
orangetreetheatre.co.uk. to 13 Jan
