I really should have taken a friend to
see this show, to watch their delight on first encountering director
Sam Walters’ solution to staging farce in the round. Since so many
farces depend on a multitude of entrances and exits, and since
cluttering up such a stage with doors would block the view for many of
the audience, Walters has his casts mime the opening and closing of
doors, whilst a stage manager, visible in one corner, “Foleys” the
sound effects. This is both an engaging piece of whimsy and an
inventive solution to a practical quandary. It is not, however, a piece
of flippancy. Walters is admirably strict about prohibiting his actors
from showing any consciousness that they are in a farce. Actors and
characters alike take the situation entirely seriously, letting the
heat build naturally until steam whistles out of the dramatic spout.
There is little point in trying to summarise the action in Georges
Feydeau’s
Le Dindon, revived
here in a puckish version by the late Peter Meyer. It is close enough
for jazz (and farce is a kind of jazz, really) to say that everyone is
either attempting or resisting adultery with everyone else, except the
elderly couple mistakenly occupying the Parisian hotel room where all
paths converge in the second of the three acts. That stage manager has
her work cut out, since as well as all those invisibly slamming doors
there is a kind of nookie alarm consisting of two electric bells
slipped beneath the mattress: yes, they’re ringing on the Seine. Yet
there is also a tart, acidic tang to Feydeau’s writing: there may be a
happy ending (after some more rushing around in the apartment of one of
the would-be adulterers), but the marriages in the play seem
precariously contingent on the partners’ sense of conjugal equity.
Orange Tree regulars anchor the cast: Stuart Fox is the husband falsely
suspected of betrayal, David Antrobus and Damien Matthews his friends
who are conspicuously up for it but with varying degrees of success.
Beth Cordingly keeps a fine poker face as the wife attempting to
establish hubby’s fidelity or in-. This is a farce, and a production,
that squares the circle: the action moves like a well-oiled machine
while the characters remain thoroughly and hearteningly human.
Written for the Financial
Times.