First things first: there’s no balloon.
Everyone remembers the red-and-white hot-air balloon in the 1956 film
version starring David Niven, but it’s not in Jules Verne’s original
book, so it’s not in Laura Eason’s stage adaptation; indeed, Eason goes
so far as to have her protagonist Phileas Fogg point this out to us.
She and director Lucy Bailey go for the whimsical and slightly silly in
their version of the tale about the phlegmatic Fogg and his wager to
cross the globe in the specified time simply to prove a point.
Disembodied hands pass objects up through trapdoors, a length of duct
tubing becomes the trunk of an otherwise unseen elephant, and Fogg
plays a hand of his beloved whist with actors offstage by producing
their cards via sleight-of-hand. Robert Portal is, if anything, more of
an adventurer than Fogg himself, having rowed across the Atlantic and
run through the Sahara. No wonder his traveller is so unflappable.
This is the production’s greatest flaw, however. Fogg is the
omnicompetent Englishman in an age when one could travel around the
planet and every inch of land one trod would be coloured British pink
in the atlas (although Fogg’s route takes him through the U.S.A. –
well, formerly pink). No delay causes him to turn a hair: he simply
hires an elephant, or buys a Chinese junk, or goes off on a raid to
liberate his French valet Passepartout from American Indians. No
problem. The problem with “no problem” is that we never feel enough is
at stake for Fogg, even when he appears to lose the wager and face
ruin. Simon Gregor’s Passepartout gets both animated and agitated, but
not enough for two; as police inspector Fix, mistakenly pursuing Fogg
on a bank robbery charge, Tony Gardner too could usefully offer more
than scowling stolidity.
The template for this style of production would seem to be the
four-person version of
The 39 Steps
which recently closed after nine years in the West End. But eight
actors don’t look as daft as four. Not quite a case of “less is more”:
the pedant in me insists on
fewer
are more.
Written for the Financial
Times.