sovay: (Cho Hakkai: intelligence)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2011-09-16 09:26 pm

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.

[identity profile] nineweaving.livejournal.com 2011-09-17 02:03 am (UTC)(link)
Fabulous! Can't wait for the 29th.

Nine

[identity profile] ide-cyan.livejournal.com 2011-09-17 08:55 am (UTC)(link)
You're making this sound really interesting! And I like Jemima Rooper! Must see if I can find this.

[identity profile] ide-cyan.livejournal.com 2011-09-17 06:28 pm (UTC)(link)
There were screenings on the 15th in the Montréal area that I missed, but no listings for an encore yet. I'll have to check again in the next couple of weeks.

(I'd seen the NTL broadcasts of Frankenstein when they played earlier this year.)

[identity profile] ide-cyan.livejournal.com 2011-09-23 06:44 am (UTC)(link)
I thought it was very good. Tough to compare the acting in the two versions without being sure whether seeing one first is what makes it seem superior to the other. (Jonny Lee Miller being maybe somewhat less charismatic than Benedict Cumberbatch -- he seemed more constrained in either role, anyway, which seemed to work better for him as Victor rather than the creature.) I saw Cumberbatch as the Creature first (& got a free ticket to the second screening because we'd had technical problems at the start). Spectacular yet sparse set design. Would've been even more spectacular in person, though the video feed had the advantage of closeups.