Review The Miser

The Miser
by Molière
Adapted by Sean Foley and Phil Porter  

The Play What Molière Wrote
http://bit.ly/TheMiserGarrickTheatre 

Apparently this is a free adaptation of the original 17th century French classic The Miser. We're tempted to say so free, all the gags are in the public domain - boom, boom!

We're also tempted to say this may turn out to be a Marmite play - oh, if only we were sponsored! - but that would be a terrible, pretentious pun on the ancient Latin source of The Miser. It's called La Marmite in French - boom, boom!

But it would be true to say those in the market for gag-driven sketch comedy panto, kept in Molière's time, may well have an appetite for this version directed by Sean Foley. Even if it has only a few hints about the imprint of the knife edge, which should press on the tender soles of the dramatis personae.

That's not to BELLOW VERY LOUDLY and all at the same pace that, amidst a theatrical rugby scrum of Molière, sub-Mel Brookes-esque, Carry On, panto, Eric and Ernie, Airplane and 1970s' style The Three Musketeers (or is it Cyrano De Bergerac?), there aren't glimpses of  what this production and script could have been.

This is mainly centred on Griff Rhys Jones as Harpagon, an avaricious, paranoid goggle-eyed Dad, a momento mori of the original text, and, eventually, Matthew Horne, pursuing his daughter, as the ardent suitor-in-disguise Valère.

Stand-up and sitcom star, Lee Mack, certainly also has the wit, timing (and projection) of a stage actor, but needs more than the one note part of put-upon Man Friday servant, Maître Jacques as portrayed in this production. That's apart from the notes he strikes on the harpsichord - boom, boom!

No, no, we take it all back - it reminds us most of all of Start The Revolution Without Me. Yes, yes, it may be anachronistic (Moliere pre-dated the French Revolution by over a century) but we're taking our cue from at least one of the gags in the current production of The Miser. And Lord, how we laughed at Americans Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder back in 1970 when TLT's now pimped up bagnole was still an Austin Morris!

At the Garrick Theatre, the momentum of the plot is all but drowned as it's asset-stripped by le déluge of jokes, ad libs and pseudo ad libs, at a frantic pace. In this "your money or Marianne" gagfest, the "I'll take the money" joke was one of the few panto gags that wasn't milked for laughs, even if it partly sums up the play.

Marianne (Ellie White), by the way, is not an anachronistic reference to the French state but Harpagon's young victim in the marriage stakes. Her true love, his son Cléante (a ribbons and bows Ryan Gage almost in Grayson Perry mode) is foisted on a more lucrative widow, while his daughter Elise (Katy Wix) is offered as the prospective "free of charge" dowerless bride of a pensioner.

That's also not to say the breaking of the fourth wall, theatrical in-jokes, music hall/vaudeville interaction with the audience and songs weren't part of 17th century stage farce.

But even Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman in The Producers and Young Frankenstein have a certain pathos and Molière's satire on archetypal money grabbing and the shackles of the dowry, which can surely be translated into contemporary terms, is blunted by standard austerity and banking stand-up circuit gags.

At the same time, we did crack a smile every now and then, were very taken with Alice Power's handsome 17th Century Parisian courtyard and hallway set and  her styling of Harpagon.

Indeed we don't mind anybody taking a liberté with an out-of-copyright text but the problem is the égalité of a world where an old miser doesn't seem more lunatic than anyone else in the play.

 If you raised anything more than a weak smile at this gag-driven review, this play, adapted by Foley and Phil Porter, may be for you. We award a-pot-of-gold amber light for an energetic mishmash of The Miser as corny as the stash of jokes kept under (alleged) tightwad Ernie Wise's (hey, we're managing almost to end seamlessly with a French word!) toupée - boom, boom!

Review The Dresser

The Dresser
by Ronald Harwood

On The Chessboard
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/duke-of-yorks/

The King is in his counting house in Ronald Harewood's 1980 play The Dresser,  but his health is failing and mental faculties faltering. Yet he remains literally a man of many roles, running a Shakespearean repertory company during World War II bombing and taking on Shakespeare's King Lear, Richard III and, yes, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in alternate performances.

Played here by Ken Stott, "Sir" the actor/manager inherits the legacy of actors like Edmund Kean in more ways than one.  He maintains a precarious hierarchy, in a manner part galley slave gangmaster, part headmaster, touring the British Isles.

All the while, he's kept on his feet, chivvied, bolstered by and nannied on to the boards by his dresser for 16 years, superstitious yet expedient Norman (Reece Shearsmith).

A comedy, a tragedy and - in the case of Norman - a touch of music hall variety, The Dresser hearks back to a repertory system age when theatre became part of, and was in part bailed out, by the national war effort.   But here the countdown to the production of King Lear, instead of an ordered chessboard,  is as out of sync as the Lear mad scene, mired, we are subtly reminded, in the dangerous politics of the time.

At its centre Stott captivates and repels with his fruity tones and timing as the collapsing, mercurial, selfish Sir.

Sir who is dependent on the lure of the footlights to impress and bring fresh meat to the company yet still determined, however haphazardly, to keep what he sees as "the faith".  

The only male actors available are those not called up - too old or invalided out. Like bespectacled Geoffrey (Simon Rouse), with the air of a civil servant rather than a thespian, unexpectedly elevated to the role of Fool. Or a saturnine Oxenby (Adam Jackson-Smith) who could possibly be a communist or maybe something else, at any rate out for "a new world order", especially if it involves  a play he has written.  

While "Sir" is "sir" to his company, it is his apparent consort who is truly "Her Ladyship" (a Wagneresque Harriet Thorpe), the daughter of a Baronet, although perhaps first brought in like another minor artistocrat's daughter who is mentioned and whose mother invested money in the company.

Also part of the aging thespian's retinue is the efficient stage manager spinster, Madge (Selina Cadell), whom we learn was dazzled at the start of her career by the footlights and "Sir" but has now having given up all hope of that first passion for  him being reciprocated,

Directed by Sean Foley, The Dresser takes place on a handsome, detailed set designed by Michael Taylor. A crossways' dressing room with corridor at the side occupies the first act and a revolving set revealing backstage, the wings and finally full frontal performance in the second, with neat musical transitions by Ben and Max Ringham and lighting from James Farncombe.

Inspired by Ronald Harwood's time as a dresser for Donald Wolfit, there's plenty of kingly pomp, as much as farcical missed entrances, in the play within the play. As well as visceral insight when the lives of the protagonists and the Shakespearean drama superimpose on each other.  Yet this is no sentimental trip down memory lane.

Despite the comedy, The Dresser is a sad, bitter play focussing on a theatrical world which subsists as a perpetually under-funded hierarchy of coercion and exploitation.

With its sporadic, if gentle, hints that performance also underpins violent debt-fuelled politics, it's a green light for this strange, double-edged dissection of a touring company at war.

Review The Painkiller

The Painkiller

by Francis Veber adapted by Sean Foley

A Shot In The Arm

http://www.branaghtheatre.com/the-painkiller

An assassin hired to take out a gangster trial witness  in one hotel room and a man deserted by his wife about to take his own life  in the next - this could be the dramatic premise of a film noir beloved of French cinema.

But throw in a camp hotel porter, a snobbish wife and psychiatrist lover complete with hypodermic needle, a policeman in the cupboard and throw a character out of the window - and what do you have, but French farce?

Originally written in 1969 by Francis Veber, the stage farce Le Contrat (The Contract) by 1973 became hit film L'Emmerdeur (A Pain In The Arse), then remade in English as Billy Wilder's last film, Buddy Buddy, before the writer himself revamped it in a new stage and film version in 2005 and 2008 respectively.

It's the last version to which director Sean Foley seems to have given an English setting and mildly updated for The Painkiller, first seen at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2011, and now part of the season run by Kenneth Branagh and his theatre company.

Branagh himself takes the role of the hitman who finds adjoining hotel rooms the equivalent of a pair of handcuffs as his fate is bound up with that of local newspaper photographer Dudley (Rob Brydon).

And just as film noir can be taken down by French farce, the life of the suave assassin (whose name, we eventually learn, is Ralph) can be thrown into disarray and overwhelmed by the failed suicide and cuckold provincial in the neighbouring room.

While French farce is by its nature a self-conscious exercise - who else but the French would expend so much intellectual exertion and exact mathematics on coming up with a credible way for powerful men to lose their trousers? - TLT and her own manacled automobile were not wholly convinced by this anglicized piece.

Branagh makes an elegant, precise Ralph, a thoroughbred stallion brought down by a pack horse, as he lurches physically and mentally from one cover up to another, from one dose of ketamine to a dose of amphetamines ...

And Brydon's Dudley as the little guy is a suitable catalyst for chaos as the Maison des Lits turns into Chienlit, ably supported by Claudie Blakley as his adulterous and social-climbing wife Michelle, Alex MacQueen as her domineering syringe-happy psychiatrist lover, Mark Hadfield as the camp hotel porter and Marcus Fraser as the plain clothes policeman drawn into the hotel fray.

However with its mane shorn of its colonial past, part-militarised police force and aristocratic pretensions within a republic, we wondered whether the farce had lost some of its logic, political bite and, yes, excruciating but cathartic pain in this British adaptation.

And at  the moment it doesn't seem to have entirely found yet its frenetic farce rhythm and needs some speedier playing. But with this fixable reservation, at 90 minutes without a break with some elegant visuals and a cast of fine actors, it still held the attention throughout. An amber light from TLT.