Swan Theater, Stratford-upon-Avon
A review by Rachel Halliburton for The Times of London.
The play stars Amber James, an actress with close ties to the Windrush generation.
What a barrel of delights this is — a rollicking update of a 16th-century romantic comedy that’s as down-to-earth as a packet of pork scratchings, liberally seasoned with salty rhymes and hip-swinging musical numbers. If you’re looking for a pantomime that’s not really a pantomime, an unearthed Elizabethan gem that sparkles with ebullient characterisation and glitterball wit, then head right now to the Dog and Arsehole.
That’s the first pub where we meet Amber James’s robustly no-nonsense Liz, a barmaid who has acquired impressive diplomatic skills from defusing brawls and hearing out beery confessions. She also has an admirer, Spencer (Philip Labey), a fop in white tights; when he’s serenading her with dancers and balloons she’s unimpressed, but when he saves her from being framed for a stabbing she starts to see his uses.
The original playwright, Thomas Heywood, was highly successful in his lifetime, ribaldly boasting that he had “an entire hand or at least a maine finger in two hundred twenty plays” — but today just a couple of dozen have survived. The writer and director Isobel McArthur won awards and plaudits for her spikily humorous Jane Austen update Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), and here she demonstrates once more her skill for bringing a contemporary gleam to well-worn witticisms.
Her rhyming narrative — delivered with wonderful comic nonchalance by Richard Katz as Pub Regular — romps between vulgarity and sophistication as she kicks the play into the 21st century. “The liberties I took amidst these plunders/ Would make an academic shit his unders,” she declares in her “playwright’s confession”, quickly refining the assertion with, “Since it’s a relic play/ Your average Joe won’t know it anyway”.
Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s timbered set jauntily transforms into three pubs and a galleon as the characters head towards a hostile Spain — these are Armada days — while the costumes are an inspired combination of modern and Elizabethan. (One character wears a tracksuit and a ruff.) From the lively ensemble, Tom Babbage turns verbal diarrhoea into an art form as Windbag, and Melissa Lowe does appropriately sterling work as the jingoistic Newspaper Man.
With numbers including Y Viva España and Please Mr Postman it feels a shame at times that the audience can’t stand up and dance along. But for inspired silliness, this is a nicely alternative Christmas cracker.
150min
To January 14, rsc.org.uk
Swan Theater, Stratford-upon-Avon A review by Rachel Halliburton for The Times of London. The play stars Amber James, an actress with close ties to the Windrush generation.What a barrel of delights this is — a rollicking update of a 16th-century romantic comedy that’s as down-to-earth as a packet of pork scratchings, liberally seasoned with salty
