CLEESE MEETS FEYDEAU. DOES IT WORK?
Farce. French farce. Feydeau farce. Fin-de-siecle farce with curly cornices and ladies in corsets. Feelings about the genre are always, for me, mixed. You can sigh at bit in these post-stigma days at attempted infidelity being quite so compulsorily hilarious; at emotional improbabilities camouflaged by a formulaic comedy of embarrassment. You know there’ll be wardrobes, doors, beds, trousers, comedy policemen , possibly (as here) a bribeable nephew. You can feel – as I did in the last two Feydeau revivals, despite great talents from Tom Hollander, Hannah Waddingham and the like – something I glumly recorded as “a despondent sense of being trapped in a museum of bygones”.
This Mercury production is interesting, though, because Feydeau’s little-seen “La Chasse” has been reworked, and well and truly fiddled with, by no less than John Cleese. It has sparks of more modern comedy , despite an elegantly complete plasterwork-to-parquet set which becomes both the bourgeois home of the Duchotels and a love-nest apartment where Monsieur the lawyer – Oliver Cotton, in the role one suspects Cleese fancies himself in – is to meet one of his client’s wives while pretending to go hunting,. And where his wife Léontine – naturellement! – agrees on the selfsame night to a revenge bonk with Dr Moricet. Leontine is quite beautifully played by Caroline Langrishe, decently convincing in her initial stiff virtue turning to indignation and in her panic in the door-and-trouser moments, but really coming into her own in the second act when a kind of mumsy exasperation suggests an actual reality inside her marriage to the straying Duchotel. The lustful doctor os Richard Earl, Sarah Crowden makes the most of being a countess-turned concierge at the lovenest, and Jess Murphy as the maid Babette deploys sone great expressions as the maid. Whose absurd French accent gives Cleese a chance for a splendid non-Feydeau joke when a character asks “Why’s she got that funny accent?” “Must be Belgian or something..”
Indeed is interesting is that he real barks of laughter are, as often as not, provoked not by the skeleton of the old farce but the furious vigour of Cleese moments – the Doctor’s mutter of “stupid hint!” and the very un-Feyddeau “I suppose a blow-job’s out of the question?”, some brief asides like “Bit corny, isn’t it?” and a moment between Duchotel and the baffled husband Chassagne – Peter Bourke – which is pure Basil-and-Manuel. The more conventional shrieks, hidings under the bed etc are far less effective triggers; the philosophical musings on infidelity just plain dull. But Langrishe is a treat. Ironically, it just needs more Cleese and less Feydeau.
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box office 01206 573948 to 11 March
rating three 
theatreCat 