FORTY YEARS ON
Chichester Festival Theatre
Opened
26 April, 2017
***

If you were casting the role of the spiky, irascible headmaster of a public school, about to retire, watching and even acting in a sort of revue of the twentieth century and constantly interrupting it to cut the scenes he disapproved of... could you imagine more ideal casting than Richard Wilson? That’s what director Daniel Evans has done for his forty-nine-years-on revival of Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On at Chichester, where Evans is the new hand on the artistic reins. But, both sad and surprising to say, that casting hasn’t worked out, so far at any rate.

Wilson is a pro from his balding, shaven head to his still-nimble-at-80 toes, and I’ve no doubt that the rest of his lines will embed themselves quick-smart. As of opening night, however, he was noticeably stealing frequent surreptitious glances at copies of the script, disguised as the order of service or the headmaster’s pages in the show (yes, disguising a script as a script, but a different script – tricksy!), and it just lets all that delicious Wilsonian steam dissipate. You can feel an explosion building, then... glance... and it just goes flump. So if you’re thinking of going to see it, give it a while to run in.

Because it’s worth the wait. Evans is a canny director who looks like pandering just enough to the more hidebound elements of the Chichester audience so that he can take them on the interesting adventures he really wants. Here, he punctuates the action with a Flying Pickets-style a capella rendition of “I Vow To Thee, My Country”, a school-choir-and-solo-tap-dancer version of the Thirties novelty number “Little Sir Echo”, and several interruptions by the school rugger team. He and musical director Tom Brady also have some 50 boys from Chichester’s youth theatre to really fill out the action and the songs.

As the headmaster-designate, director and star of the revue, Alan Cox makes full use of his skill at remaining almost entirely deadpan yet somehow signalling to us that he knows this is pretty ridiculous. Jenny Galloway as Matron has a couple of nicely understated scenes, and Danny Lee Wynter gets to run the gamut from earnest and subdued to, almost literally, Lady Bracknell on speed.

Alan Bennett always lampoons Englishness while also embracing it, and this is where he established the formula: the very name Albion House makes clear that the school is an emblem of the country as a whole. When it premièred in 1968, I suspect this meant pricking national pride about the still relatively recent Second World War; in Brexit Britain 2017, it may feel more like reinflating those myths for us to take refuge in. Either way, it’s a deft balancing act.

Written for The Lady.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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