VICTORIAN MISCHIEF WELL IN TUNE FOR TODAY
. Do you want to see a senior Government minister entangled with a socially climbing financier and a fashion-greedy wife, playing the flute to calm himself? Will you, in these troubled times, feel the better for seeing Dillie Keane having more fun than is decent in black bombazine and lace cap, quavering ferociously about lochs in an extreme cod Scottish accent while her kilted giant of a son strikes up on the accordion? Have you always wanted to see Nancy Carroll in a bustle wrestling an insider-trading cockney upstart to the ground? Seek no further, for the Menier will provide.
It seems that during the gloom of Covid Nancy Carroll decided to set about trimming and adapting one of Arthur Wing Pinero’s less remembered drawing-room farces from 1890: a knotted social, marital and political tangle whose absurd intricacy makes PG Wodehouse look like Ibsen. With a stroke of theatrical genius (and director Paul Foster and composer Sarah Travis) the cast of 12 is over half actor-musicians, who troop in at the start playing together and later keep dropping in the odd few notes to illustrate the action. Thus Rosalind Ford’s Imogen may impetuously seize her ‘cello and bow when stricken with inappropriate love for the fiery social rebel Val, or Fanny Lacklustre, the scheming socially ambitious dressmaker, make her point 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 gives way in the second half, with much rapid shifting, to the great hall of Drumdurris castle. Sir Julian is broke and both he and his lady (Carroll herself) are entangled with Lacklustre’s financier brother, so have been forced to bring the pair of vulgarians up for a toff August. It’s complicated by the ambition of Lady MacPhail (that’s Dilly Keane) to marry her speechless son into the political stratosphere : though poor Sir Colin, as she says while he awks beardedly around in a dinner suit, “feels like a caged eagle in the drrresss of the South”. The embarrassingly low-caste but massively rich houseguest, however, is not only eating the wrong way at breakfast but nursing a corrupt political plot as well as a social one. The plot thickens.
It’s a slyly delightful moment to revive it: some of Pinero’s lines ring out 134 years later to general glee. Val is a global wanderer seeking freedom from sham and bluster who finds himself disgusted at finding 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 quit politics and retire to live “in a marsh, growing vegetables”. The Minister hates politics anyway, and calls Westminster a lion’s den of dishonesty.
Everything is further complicated by the interference of the dowager Drumdurris, the unmatchable Sara Crowe who darts in and out of the set’s two doors making everyone’s life more difficult, including an invisible daughter-in-law who can’t decide whether to train her baby for politics or the Army. And Lady MacPhail’s romantic insistence on the superiority of the heights of Ben Muchtiewhatsit and the kilted North is not, it turns out, shared by her son, Matthew Woodyatt a magnificently cowed hunk. I require their brief unforgettable duet at the opening of the second half to be filmed and provided online in perpetuity, to improve national morale. Though possibly not the SNP’s.
Menierchocolatefactory.com. To 16 november
Rating 4.
theatreCat 