CHARLEY'S AUNT
Touring; seen at Richmond Theatre
20 April, 2007
**
There are two crucial requirements for the performance of farce. One is
that the physical business, the ballet of increasing frenzy and
absurdity, be executed with flair and precision. On this score Mel
Smith's second production of Charley's
Aunt (he directed a fondly remembered version in 1983 with Griff
Rhys Jones in the cross-dressing title role) scores highly. When Lord
Fancourt Babberley attempts to borrow several bottles of his friends'
champagne, the business with the bottle-filled bag is as crisp and
complex as a vaudeville hat-swapping routine; when Babberley is
prevailed upon to don a dress and act as chaperone to his pals'
respective beloveds, Smith and actor Stephen Tompkinson get great
mileage out of his relish in their displays of girlish affection.
The other vital ingredient is that actors should seem to believe in
their characters and situations. Obviously, one can't play Brandon
Thomas's 1892 piece as if it were Strindberg, but if all words and
actions are cartooned even when the immediate action does not licence
it, then all we are left with is, to use the argot the play, a lot of
chaps acting the giddy ass. My heart sank when the curtain rose to
reveal David Partridge's Jack Chesney in amorous soliloquy, already
saucer-eyed and speaking straight out to the audience. (At several
moments, too, one or more actors "clock" the audience knowingly, with
the worst kind of it's all-just-pretend-really smugness.)
The linchpin is the actor playing Babberley. Tompkinson throws himself
into the business, but hurls his voice and face around to a similar
degree. A few years ago in Arsenic
And Old Lace, I thought his performance wildly misjudged; I am
afraid that this outing confirms that he simply does not understand
farce, mistakenly thinking that size is all that's important. He can
wring ten or fifteen seconds out of a pause before the mock-aunt's
catchphrase about being from Brazil, "Where the nuts come from", and
one of the earliest occurrences is already so huge as to make "A
handbag?!" sound like Gregorian chant. You get a lot of bang for your
buck, to be sure, but without any targeting, it amounts to a comedic
scorched-earth operation.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
Return to index of
reviews
for the year 2007
Return to master
reviews
index
Return to main theatre
page
Return to Shutters
homepage