GOLDSMITH BEATEN LIGHT AS AIR
Nice symmetry in Tom Littler’s decision to set Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy in the Wodehousian Jazz Age: the Georgians, with their boozy monarchs and coffe-house sarcasms, were mischievous spirits before Queen Victoria and Dickens arrived to demand decorum. So here’s a curmudgeonly husband with a bossy and flighty wife, planning matches for their young with mixed results. Here’s an elopement, a minxy rebel, and a callow Woosterish public schoolboy who can’t relate to his own class of girl but only to barmaids , so a clever girl must pose as one to net him. And that’s before you get to the purloined jewel box forever falling into the wrong hands: a clear forerunner of Wodehouse’s stolen silver cow-creamer.
It fits beautifully in the cosy panelled and galleried theatre, swagged with Christmas decorations as we gather intimately around and above the living room , the inn and the living room mistaken for an inn. (If ever Littler decides to programme a play set in a desert or spaceship his designers will have a more troublesome job than Neil Irish and Anett Black did with this one).
But the pleasures of this rumbustious production go deeper. David Horovitch and Greta Scacchi are as fine as you’d expect, magnificently explosive at times; Tanya Reynolds is an engaging Kate, serious when needed and a complete mistress of the classic 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 rustic, as the young squire who rightly prefers Bet Bouncer’s “cheeks as red as a pulpit cushion” down the pub, to the threat of marrying his more polished cousin. He sings to his ukelele in the Two Pigeons public bar , pleasingly peopled with a community chorus of eight or nine revellers. And Richard Derrington makes he very, very most of Diggory the dishevelled manservant, doddering for England with every move provoking ripples of delight.
But two important things shine. One is that all the cast are utterly at home with the complex 18c prose and its meaning: it trips off their tongues as natural as breathing. And that can be harder than speaking Shakespeare: more rat-a-tat rhythms, no restful iambics. If this show wasn’t almost sold out I would urge all Eng Lit teachers to bring recalcitrant pupils who whine for recognizability to show them just how comfortable 250- year- old expressions can feel.
The other important merit is is in the physical comedy and “business”. Julia Cave is credited for movement direction, and I cannot speak highly enough of Scacchi’s Martini-and-olive play, the rebel niece’s mastery of a riding-crop, Horovitch’s finely judged throwing of a stilton cheese, Kate’s very suggestive polishing of the gramophone horn, a superb grape-catch from Freddie Fox, and Diggory’s triple brolly-muff-and-handbag hurl. Or of all the perfectly judged table-leaping, sofa flopping, suitcase-dragging work and moments of manic panic and baffled stasis, as when Freddie Fox is stuck on a chair clutching, for no willing reason, a tiny 1920s jewelled handbag.
Indeed all the laddish exchanges , banterings and irritations between the young men – Fox and Robert Mountford – are pulsing with life. And I have never seen Fox before in such broad comedy, and long for him to do more: before: his helpless bespectacled shyness round Kate, his 180 degree turn to leering-down to the supposed barmaid, his puppyish overconfidence and humiliated horror are all spot-on: exaggerated just to the point where comedy shades into wincing affectionate sympathy.
It is altogether the first of the Christmas treats, ended with a fine jazz dance curtain call, and for all these reasons its fifth mouse is the rarely deployed Christmouse, dancing on the cat’s party squeaker…
orangetreetheatre.co.uk. to 13 Jan
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