First names are for girls and Norwegians
It is not worth trying to summarize the plot of Richard Bean's One Man, Two Guvnors, because I'll get a nosebleed and farce has never revolved around such niceties as plausible human interaction in the first place. It's a very funny show. The setting is Brighton, 1963. Our hero in the finest traditions of commedia dell' arte is Francis Henshall (James Corden), late of an unsuccessful one-man skiffle band ("the definition of mental illness—cymbals between me knees") and an even more unsuccessful engagement minding London gangster Roscoe Crabbe, who brought a knife to a fistfight with his sister's boyfriend and lost; this as much as anything else serves to explain why Rachel Crabbe (Jemima Rooper) is hiding from the police en travesti as her murdered twin and why the boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris), has likewise gone to ground in the world's least inconspicuous dark glasses, but the fact that Francis winds up working for both of them without telling either is just the laws of Plautus. Throw in a moping would-be actor, a ditzy should-have-been bride, a tight-fisted father, a Parkhurst-trained chef, and a Latin-spouting lawyer to gladden Graziano's heart, and the stage would be set except that the cast are competing to chew it to pieces. The tight-sweatered bookkeeper Dolly (Suzie Toase) is the only person in all this lunacy with her head screwed on straight—she's the Colombina—but even she finds it more fun to flirt with the transparently improvisatory Francis than to sort out the situation. You can't blame her. The source material is the 1753 Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni) with a riot of regional accents replacing Goldoni's Venetian and lazzi straight out of the music halls; it's just that entertaining to watch.
I had barely heard of Corden before this show, but he makes Francis an endearing, nimbly unprincipled Arlecchino in a perpetual free-fall of ad-libs, the kind of comic katamari whose attempts to be sensible with himself turn into a knock-down, drag-out tussle of two minds which he only settles by bashing himself in the face with a bin lid and who wails in a moment of existential despair, "Oh, I can't stop thinking about chips!" I'd never heard of Chris, but he's fabulous as Stanley, a lanky, swaggering echt public school boy whose dialogue appears to have been randomly generated out of Oxford slang, minced oaths, and no mental filters at all, like a terrifying amalgam of Ned the Piemaker and Arnold Rimmer, Ace mode. ("Whoever thought of that one, well, wrap his balls in bacon and send him to Nurse!") Special mention also goes to Tom Edden as the one-scene wonder Alfie, a wild-eyed, reflex-scrambled, eighty-something novice waiter with a dodgy pacemaker and shellshock left over from Gallipoli who lurches around the stage like a badly reconstructed zombie of Marty Feldman's Igor—I am a hard sell on physical comedy that involves personal injury, but I have never seen anyone pitch haplessly down stairs with more perfect timing. There is an exactly period house band, The Craze, who evolve over the course of the evening from spoons-and-washboard skiffle into sharp-hipped British rock. There are good-humored victims from the audience and one magnificent ringer. I don't know about the man in the third row with the hummus sandwich, but I really hope he was real. The entire cast can sing.
There's a rebroadcast on the 29th. You want to see it. I'm going to go watch this Carry On movie on TCM; it seems appropriate.
I had barely heard of Corden before this show, but he makes Francis an endearing, nimbly unprincipled Arlecchino in a perpetual free-fall of ad-libs, the kind of comic katamari whose attempts to be sensible with himself turn into a knock-down, drag-out tussle of two minds which he only settles by bashing himself in the face with a bin lid and who wails in a moment of existential despair, "Oh, I can't stop thinking about chips!" I'd never heard of Chris, but he's fabulous as Stanley, a lanky, swaggering echt public school boy whose dialogue appears to have been randomly generated out of Oxford slang, minced oaths, and no mental filters at all, like a terrifying amalgam of Ned the Piemaker and Arnold Rimmer, Ace mode. ("Whoever thought of that one, well, wrap his balls in bacon and send him to Nurse!") Special mention also goes to Tom Edden as the one-scene wonder Alfie, a wild-eyed, reflex-scrambled, eighty-something novice waiter with a dodgy pacemaker and shellshock left over from Gallipoli who lurches around the stage like a badly reconstructed zombie of Marty Feldman's Igor—I am a hard sell on physical comedy that involves personal injury, but I have never seen anyone pitch haplessly down stairs with more perfect timing. There is an exactly period house band, The Craze, who evolve over the course of the evening from spoons-and-washboard skiffle into sharp-hipped British rock. There are good-humored victims from the audience and one magnificent ringer. I don't know about the man in the third row with the hummus sandwich, but I really hope he was real. The entire cast can sing.
There's a rebroadcast on the 29th. You want to see it. I'm going to go watch this Carry On movie on TCM; it seems appropriate.
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Nine
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I think you will like it very much. There's a joke about clementsing in the first five minutes.
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I thought it was!
And I like Jemima Rooper!
It's probably typecasting, but after this I wanted to see her in Twelfth Night. With a better haircut.
Must see if I can find this.
I don't know where you are, but here are the participating theaters. Best of luck!
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(I'd seen the NTL broadcasts of Frankenstein when they played earlier this year.)
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I missed that—what did you think of it?
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