It’s comedy with the precision of a high end cuckoo clock: PATRICK MARMION reviews Noises Off
Noises off (Phoenix Theatre, London)
Verdict: Creaky but still cracking
Rating: ****
Alex Edelman — Just For Us (Menier Chocolate Factory, London)
Verdict: Seinfeld reborn
Rating: ****
The scenery is meant to wobble. The gags are meant to make us groan. And the trouser-dropping, door-banging chaos is supposed to creak like the Mary Celeste.
But as a bravura piece of comic plotting, Michael Frayn’s vintage farce — now in the West End starring Felicity Kendal, Tracy-Ann Oberman, Alexander Hanson and Matthew Kelly — is right up there with Fawlty Towers.
Nor does Lindsay Posner’s clockwork production hide its homage, thanks to music between acts that is strongly reminiscent of the TV show’s theme tune.
Unlike John Cleese’s comedy, though, this doesn’t have familiar characters like Basil, Sybil and The Major. And it’s definitely showing its age, with gags that include a reference to Dame Myra Hess (a once famous, fag-puffing pianist, M’Lud) playing on through the air raids.
Hamming it up a treat: Joseph Millson, Felicity Kendal and Matthew Kelly in Noises Off
At times, you have to concentrate so hard on the madcap yarn about a calamitous 1970s touring comedy, you can forget to laugh.
Perhaps most crucially, the play lacks a single randy protagonist to ‘get behind’ (titter ye not).
And yet, even after all these years, you cannot but be astonished at the dazzling brilliance of Frayn’s intricate set-ups.
Plates of sardines get misplaced, the phone gets trashed, handles come off doors and a fire axe is employed as an instrument of silent jealous revenge, backstage, during a matinee. It is comedy with the precision of a high-end cuckoo clock.
No wonder, then, that Hanson — as the show’s fictional director — gives a slightly mechanical, Thunderbirds-puppet performance (touch hair, check watch, suspend wrists). There is also something of the marionette about Felicity Kendal, as the housekeeper with the ropey ‘Northern’ accent, obliged only to go through convoluted motions ferrying props.
Kelly is more lifelike as the theatrical lag, louche and whiffy, who keeps missing his entrance playing the burglar.
Jonathan Coy adds pathos to the property’s tax-dodging owner with a morbid fear of blood. And Oberman is a vision in shocking pink and orange fake tan who wafts her limbs about in a doomed attempt to save the sinking ship.
The turn of the night, though, belongs to Joseph Millson, whose stage character — a suburban estate agent — is hoping to use the country manor setting as a love nest.
It’s a masterclass of physical comedy, risking injury as he tumbles down stairs — think of Mr Bean and Basil Fawlty rolled into one. So, while the ancient farce creaks, Millson makes sure it also crackles.
American comedian Alex Edelman looks like Jerry Seinfeld. He tells gags like Seinfeld. And he operates at a similar volume to Seinfeld — as though addressing his profoundly deaf grandmother in Row Z.
Whoever had the idea of mic-ing him up in this intimate venue must be seriously hard of hearing. At least you won’t miss a syllable of his shaggy dog story about how, as an Ashkenazi Jew whose ancestors emigrated from Poland, he had the hare-brained idea of attending a meeting of neo-Nazis in Queens, New York.
Here, he tells how he was delighted to get chatting to a very attractive blonde (‘you never know your luck!’), while munching on free ‘supremacist’ pastries. And then, at the meeting itself, they sat in an ‘anti-semi-circle’.
It’s a pretty slight yarn and much of Edelman’s 90-minute act is taken up with digressions about Robin Williams, Coco the signing gorilla and the ins and outs of ethnic hierarchies in today’s Boston.
But the refreshing thing is that the stand-up has a gift for sniffing out loony-toon conspiracy theorists lurking in many a closet.
Just bring your ear plugs.
Farcical fun with Murder Poppins
The Unfriend (Criterion Theatre)
Verdict: A rollicking blast from the past
Rating: ****
Here’s a blast from the past. A very funny blast, very much from the past. Indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking that, but for the mention of mobile phones and Google, you had been transported back to the theatre of the 1970s.
Steven (Sherlock) Moffat’s debut is a peculiarly old-fashioned play, a very British comedy of middle-class manners, overflowing with lavatory humour, political incorrectness, excruciating social embarrassment and, in Mark Gatiss’s otherwise well-oiled production, a scene-change so archaically lumbering, it’s laughable.
The plot is preposterous, the characters impossibly exaggerated, the stagecraft unexceptional and there’s not so much as a flicker of emotional truth to disturb or discombobulate. All of which is the play’s USP.
Here’s a blast from the past. A very funny blast, very much from the past. Widow’s might: Frances Barber as Elsa
For anyone looking for two hours of undiluted escapism, it’s a rollicking night out.
The situation (for this is a sit-com) is this: while on a cruise, Debbie (Amanda Abbington) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith) meet Elsa (Frances Barber), a larger-than-life American widow. The antithesis of woke, she wears her armour-plated insensitivity with pride. She is unapologetically Trump-loving (‘I’d do him’) and shamelessly describes an obese girl as ‘a whale with lips’.
However, when she arrives — uninvited — on the doorstep of Debbie and Peter’s suburban home, she comes with baggage: dozens of Louis Vuitton trunks and alarming online accusations.
Too polite to turn her away, Debbie and Peter watch in terror and amazement as Elsa, or ‘Murder Poppins’, as Debbie calls her, miraculously tames their teenagers (Gabriel Howell and Maddie Holliday).
Alas, no magic can make their terminally boring neighbour (gloriously funny Michael Simkins) interesting enough for anyone to remember he exists. In the show’s best moment, a blanched, silent, near paralysed Shearsmith strains hopelessly to recall his name.
The Unfriend is irresistibly light and slight. Go! It’s heavenly!
GEORGINA BROWN
Escape into delightfully enchanted dreamworld
The Sleeping Beauty (Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House)
Verdict: Ravishing fairy tale
Rating: ****
It’s cold outside; you have to check before you travel in case it’s a strike day; the cost of living is nuts . . . what we need is to get away from all this. Let me give you, folks, The Sleeping Beauty.
This Royal Ballet production is a revival of the company’s first production at Covent Garden in 1946 by Oliver Messel.
It’s a trip inside a fairy story, which opens with a recreation of Antoine Watteau’s pictures of enchanted places, an exquisite world of courtly pleasures.
As Sir Roy Strong recalled, the original designs ‘had a grandeur expressed through a silvery transparency of effect, as though one were wandering through a dream’. That sums it up.
Let me give you, folks, Sleeping Beauty. Wicked fairy: Kristen McNally
An enchanting set, some of Tchaikovsky’s most voluptuous music, choreography that demands the utmost of experienced dancers . . . add to all this a cast of virtuosity and brio. It may not be helpful to describe one night’s cast, since it changes — me, I’d look out for the fabulous Francesca Hayward as the Princess — but Marianela Nunez as Aurora and Vadim Muntagirov as an idealistic Prince Florimund would be hard to better.
Miss Nunez may be getting on a bit (she’s 40) but she played the 16-year-old Aurora with youthful coquettishness and mature assurance. Her Rose Adagio was a marvel, a series of demanding balances with her four suitors.
As for Florimund, his jumps across the stage had this viewer tensing in her seat.
The costumes are dreamy, and we find that just as Aurora sleeps for 100 years, so the courtly 17th-century magnificence changes to 18th-century hunting dress.
The best part, inevitably, is Carabosse, the bad fairy with her entourage of devilish mice, and Kristen McNally camps up the role for all she is worth.
There is comedy in Thomas Whitehead’s master of ceremonies and more fun with the other fairytale characters, especially David Donnelly’s Wolf, forever chasing Red Riding Hood.
Escapism? You bet.
MELANIE McDONAGH
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