DONKEYS' YEARS (Rose Theatre, Kingston-on-Thames)
Verdict: A tour de farce
Rating:
There used to be a cricket writer, Alan Gibson, whose despatches invariably included a description of his calamitous train journey to the county ground from which he was reporting. I thought of Gibson on my way to see Michael Frayn’s ace 1976 farce Donkeys’ Years.
Farce preceded the farce. My head full of politics and cobwebs, I clambered aboard the wrong train, which then crawled at the pace of a slug. When I finally realised my error, it took a while to find a connecting train. That, too, made slow progress.
On reaching Kingston I found no taxis to speed me to the Rose Theatre, so had to run. I arrived with a stitch, bathed in sweat. And I had missed the start.
No matter! Director Lisa Spirling has come up with such a cracking production, I was laughing within a minute. What with my stitch, this hurt. It also brought on a threat of asthma.
Playwright Frayn understood that college reunions are hideous. His characters, all male bar one, have returned to their Oxbridge college after 25 years.
One (Jamie Glover) has become an MP and junior education minister. One (braw John Hodgkinson) is a boisterous vicar. There is a suave civil servant (Jason Durr), a shifty journalist/writer (Simon Coates) and a dimwit surgeon (Nicholas Rowe, as ever a delight to watch).
Add the college Master’s willowy wife, Lady Driver (Jemma Redgrave) and a little Welshman (Ian Hughes) with a combover — a shocker, as bad as the one Leon Brittan used to sport. No one can remember the Welshman, who is near-teetotal. As an undergraduate he was never given a room in college and had to live ‘out’ in lodgings.
Polly Sullivan’s set suggests a classic quad with Virginia creeper. These trellises are cleverly removed to become bookcases when the action moves inside to a room where various drunken japes occur after the dinner.
The comedy operates on a number of levels: the class snootishness, the vortex of drunken revelry, the transformation of the brilliant Mr Hughes’s parasitologist Welshman into a judo-kicking maniac — and the sheer technical ability of the farce-making, with doors banging and trousers dropping and a glamorous woman being hidden from view behind one of those banging doors.
I loved it. And I feel that Alan Gibson would have done, too.
Verdict: A tour de farce
Rating:
There used to be a cricket writer, Alan Gibson, whose despatches invariably included a description of his calamitous train journey to the county ground from which he was reporting. I thought of Gibson on my way to see Michael Frayn’s ace 1976 farce Donkeys’ Years.
Farce preceded the farce. My head full of politics and cobwebs, I clambered aboard the wrong train, which then crawled at the pace of a slug. When I finally realised my error, it took a while to find a connecting train. That, too, made slow progress.
On reaching Kingston I found no taxis to speed me to the Rose Theatre, so had to run. I arrived with a stitch, bathed in sweat. And I had missed the start.
No matter! Director Lisa Spirling has come up with such a cracking production, I was laughing within a minute. What with my stitch, this hurt. It also brought on a threat of asthma.
Playwright Frayn understood that college reunions are hideous. His characters, all male bar one, have returned to their Oxbridge college after 25 years.
One (Jamie Glover) has become an MP and junior education minister. One (braw John Hodgkinson) is a boisterous vicar. There is a suave civil servant (Jason Durr), a shifty journalist/writer (Simon Coates) and a dimwit surgeon (Nicholas Rowe, as ever a delight to watch).
Add the college Master’s willowy wife, Lady Driver (Jemma Redgrave) and a little Welshman (Ian Hughes) with a combover — a shocker, as bad as the one Leon Brittan used to sport. No one can remember the Welshman, who is near-teetotal. As an undergraduate he was never given a room in college and had to live ‘out’ in lodgings.
Polly Sullivan’s set suggests a classic quad with Virginia creeper. These trellises are cleverly removed to become bookcases when the action moves inside to a room where various drunken japes occur after the dinner.
The comedy operates on a number of levels: the class snootishness, the vortex of drunken revelry, the transformation of the brilliant Mr Hughes’s parasitologist Welshman into a judo-kicking maniac — and the sheer technical ability of the farce-making, with doors banging and trousers dropping and a glamorous woman being hidden from view behind one of those banging doors.
I loved it. And I feel that Alan Gibson would have done, too.
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