Talk about a guilty pleasure. Ben Travers’s farce from 1926 is as daft and rickety as they come, an absurd confection of cause and effect. The country-cottage set looks like something out of am-dram. Yet Terry Johnson’s frantically precise production for the ever-surprising Chocolate Factory made me laugh more than is seemly or sensible.
If the conventions of Travers’s comedy look old-fashioned, the subject matter seems quite racy for its time. It sings with the distant possibility of sex. Recently-wed Gerald Popkiss finds himself alone in a rented seaside home with a nice young girl in dew-drenched pyjamas. She’s been cast out by her German stepfather for a trivial offence but scurrilous village gossip, propagated by Gerald’s waspish sister-in-law, has it that the girl is "fast".
Alternately aided and hampered by his wet brother-in-law Harold and roguish cousin Clive, Gerald finds himself sweating and twitching through a hectic comedy of manners, slamming doors and misconstrued good intentions like a frog impaled on an electrode.
It’s the sort of scenario where cats exist only to be stepped on, loofahs to be sat upon, and servants to be abused by brittle young toffs. Where the natural place for a dropped, incriminating golf club is down Gerald’s trousers. A too-stringent probing of the twisted logic of farce is largely prevented, though, by the conviction of Johnson’s cast.
Neil Stuke strains a bit to incarnate Gerald’s abject desperation. But he carries off with panache the comic physical business. Kellie Shirley has just the right air of heedless pulchritude as the runaway, Rhoda, curling and flexing like a Cheshire cat. Edward Baker-Duly has a name and a languid swagger perfect for this sort of stuff, and he delivers a splendidly deft, airy performance as Clive. Victoria Yeates deserves mention for a lovely late cameo as a village wench coaxed rather easily out of her frock.
Best not to look too closely at the plot, much less the sexual politics. Travers takes delight in linguistic and romantic confusion, and absurdity for its own sake. Most people will be glad that they really don’t make ’em like this any more. But the clockwork meticulousness and rollicking impetus of Johnson’s revival makes me glad, too, that they did, once upon a time.
Until 20 June (020 7907 7060,
www.menierchocolatefactory).
Rookery Nook
The Menier Chocolate Factory
Southwark Street, SE1 1RU
