VICTORIAN MISCHIEF WELL IN TUNE FOR TODAY
. Do you wish to see a senior Government minister entangled with a socially climbing financier and a fashion-greedy spouse, enjoying the flute to calm himself? Will you, in these troubled instances, really feel the higher for seeing Dillie Keane having extra enjoyable than is respectable in black bombazine and lace cap, quavering ferociously about lochs in an excessive cod Scottish accent whereas her kilted large of a son strikes up on the accordion? Have you all the time wished to see Nancy Carroll in a bustle wrestling an insider-trading cockney upstart to the bottom? Seek no additional, for the Menier will present.
It appears that in the gloom of Covid Nancy Carroll determined to set about trimming and adapting one among Arthur Wing Pinero’s much less remembered drawing-room farces from 1890: a knotted social, marital and political tangle whose absurd intricacy makes PG Wodehouse appear like Ibsen. With a stroke of theatrical genius (and director Paul Foster and composer Sarah Travis) the solid of 12 is over half actor-musicians, who troop in in the beginning enjoying collectively and later maintain dropping within the odd few notes for instance the motion. Thus Rosalind Ford’s Imogen could impetuously seize her ‘cello and bow when stricken with inappropriate love for the fiery social insurgent Val, or Fanny Lacklustre, the scheming socially bold dressmaker, make her level with a fiddle-based double entendre when the hapless, disillusioned politician – Nicholas Rowe a frock -coated skinny gangle of gloomy discomfort – picks up his flute. Brilliant.
A painstakingly fringed and tasselled Victorian parlour offers means within the second half, with a lot fast shifting, to the good corridor of Drumdurris fort. Sir Julian is broke and each he and his woman (Carroll herself) are entangled with Lacklustre’s financier brother, so have been pressured to carry the pair of vulgarians up for a toff August. It’s sophisticated by the ambition of Lady MacPhail (that’s Dilly Keane) to marry her speechless son into the political stratosphere : although poor Sir Colin, as she says whereas he awks beardedly round in a dinner go well with, “feels like a caged eagle in the drrresss of the South”. The embarrassingly low-caste however massively wealthy houseguest, nevertheless, shouldn’t be solely consuming the mistaken means at breakfast however nursing a corrupt political plot in addition to a social one. The plot thickens.
It’s a slyly pleasant second to revive it: a few of Pinero’s traces ring out 134 years later to common glee. Val is a world wanderer in search of freedom from sham and bluster who finds himself disgusted at discovering fellow-countrymen even in Bolivia – “British pomp has spread like mould across the globe”. Lady Twombley, having herself risen from a humble dairymaid, lives in dread of her husband having to stop politics and retire to stay “in a marsh, growing vegetables”. The Minister hates politics anyway, and calls Westminster a lion’s den of dishonesty.
Everything is additional sophisticated by the interference of the dowager Drumdurris, the unmatchable Sara Crowe who darts out and in of the set’s two doorways making everybody’s life harder, together with an invisible daughter-in-law who can’t resolve whether or not to coach her child for politics or the Army. And Lady MacPhail’s romantic insistence on the prevalence of the heights of Ben Muchtiewhatsit and the kilted North shouldn’t be, it seems, shared by her son, Matthew Woodyatt a magnificently cowed hunk. I require their temporary unforgettable duet on the opening of the second half to be filmed and supplied on-line in perpetuity, to enhance nationwide morale. Though presumably not the SNP’s.
Menierchocolatefactory.com. To 16 november
Rating 4.
