The Victorian ripped wallpaper, tattered chaise longue and battered leather chairs, sets us up the vision of an old French chateau in the countryside.
The plot is centred around this chateau with four people in the family trying to keep a foothold in it. The speed of the action and quick reverses of affection between the characters shows this is a confection for fun, not serious contemplation. It’s a sort of ‘who-dun-it’ – think ‘Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick’ – but it keeps the audience interested as it weaves about Jeeves and Wooster style.
The characters are posh but not wealthy (the chateau is crumbling as they argue). Alice, the owner of the chateau (she paid for it), is trying to get her long term partner of 30 years, Major Jake Townshend, out of the house as he becomes increasingly eccentric. He has holed himself up in his ‘bunker’ upstairs, is increasingly dilatory in hygiene, and feeds himself and his dog, Pongo, on maggoty food. Meanwhile his children have come down from London to try and ensure their half of the inheritance.
Jake played by Gregory Cox gives gravitas to what is fundamentally a comic role about someone in early stage dementia. His foil is Monty, another retired soldier delightfully hammed up by Harry Saks, reminiscent of Darling in Blackadder. Both buffoon about bouncing off each other in the fight for Alice’s affections while Amanda Holt plays the acid-tongued Alice with industrial levels of older-woman disdain.
Jake’s two adult children, the inevitable sexy French maid and a lascivious gendarme make up the cast. It is all overplayed for laughs (a group of young girls in the audience were positively guffawing) and owes more than a little to the Whitehall farces of the 1950s and 60s, not to mention the original French farces to which the title gives a nod. Some scenes are pure physical comedy, like the pair in an illicit tryst who hide behind the curtains while other characters on stage talk about them. It is good to see a cast of seven, often all together on stage, making the play a rather blustering wheeze.
Ianthe Bathurst as Jake’s daughter oozed charm, but with enough feminist edge to seduce the bumbling Inspector Bertrand Gascon. He is played for laughs by Nirjay Mahindru with a heavy guttural French accent as he arrives to investigate a shooting and a murder. Chris Tomkins has good stage presence as he swaggers about as a young Tom Cruise seducing the giggling French maid, all oomphs and ooh-la-las.
I loved the plot but it surprises when the story begins to turn on events in Ukraine and the invasion of 2022. Well, nothing like contemporary relevance, but the bluntness of the approach did leave me thinking of agitprop theatre of the 1980s. Still, these are well-defined characters with well-established preoccupations, even if they do have a tendency to burst into song a couple of times, though this was not needed. On the whole, a rather spiffing evening.
Genre: Farce
Cast: Amanda Holt, Natasha Percival, Harry Saks, Gregory Cox, Chris Tomkins, Ianthe Bathurst, Nirjay Mahindru
Playwright: Davis Shirreff
Director: Kenneth Michaels
Performance Dates: 4-15th March 2025
Starting Time: 7.30.
Running Time: 2 hours incl. 15 min interval
Produced by Crunch Productions