✭✭✭✭✩

by Ray Cooney & Tony Hilton, directed by Marcia Kash

Drayton Entertainment, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge

July 26-August 12, 2017;

Playhouse II, Grand Bend

August 16-September 2, 2017

Clifton:“I didn't come here to be insulted!”

Jugg: “Where do you usually go?”

Connoisseurs of British farce, or indeed anyone who wants to laugh so hard  they need to come up for air, should make their way pronto to see One for the Pot at Playhouse II at Grand Bend.  The most memorable time the farce appeared in Ontario was in 1996 when Mirvish presented the Shaw Festival production of the play starring the inimitable Heath Lamberts as Billy Hickory Wood.  Now Drayton Entertainment has revived the farce with audience favourite Eddie Glen as Billy heading a first-rate cast with expert farce director Marcia Kash at the helm.  If you want to see farce this summer as it should be done, see this.

One for the Pot (1959), the first play written by major farceur Ray Cooney, premiered in Richmond, UK, and transferred to the Whitehall Theatre in London, later identified with the genre, in 1961 where it ran for four and a half years.  All the typical confusion of the farce stems from one man simply trying to do a good deed.  The wealthy Jonathan Hardcastle (Brian Tree) wants to honour his late business partner, who gambled away his estate, by offering £10,000 to his partner’s long-lost son Billy Hickory Wood if Billy will present himself as per an advertisement in the paper and confirm that he has no other living relatives. 

The play is like a P.G. Wodehouse novel come alive.  The Hardcastle’s butler Jugg (David Leyshon) is very like Wodehouse’s Jeeves, except that Jugg shirks work as much as possible and only gives his advice for a fee.  Jonathan Hardcastle under the thumb of his domineering sister Amy (Andrea Risk) is very like Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth henpecked by his sister Constance.  Even the satire on modernist art, here focussed on art critic Clifton Weaver (Kyle Golemba), who is also after Cynthia’s hand, is a frequent theme in Wodehouse.       

In production the play is like an extended magic trick.  Edie Glen miraculously exits as one Hickory Wood through one of four exits of Allan Willbee’s lovely set only to re-enter seconds later through another as a different Hickory Wood.  When the actions really heats up two or even three Hickory Woods appear to be on stage at the same time. 

Action this complex has to be expertly choreographed and impeccably carried out for the farce to work.  That is why critics often point out that farce is the most difficult theatrical genre.  Timing is everything and it must be perfect.

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Cooney’s Run for Your Wife by Drayton Entertainment in 2014 or Philip King’s See How They Run at Theatre Aquarius in 2012, both directed by Marcia Kash, will know that she is one of the few directors working in Canada who know how to direct farce properly.  Recent attempts at farce at Soulpepper or at the Stratford or Shaw festivals have failed because directors have taken the dubious path of trying to make the plays funnier without establishing the basics of who is where when necessary for this most theatrical form of comedy.   

Kash not only has the farces she directs run like clockwork, but makes the extreme artifice necessary to the form seem perfectly natural.  She manages to have us adjust our sensibilities quickly to a world where spiking drinks, locking people in cupboards or trunks, pretending not to hear loud noises and especially owning up to a false identity are standard operating procedure.

Eddie Glen distinguishes the three Hickory Woods through accent, posture and gesture, though he he could makes his posh accent even posher to create a greater difference between the ignorant Billy and the worldly Rupert.  Glen is a master of comic timing and physical comedy.  The audience loves the few times Kash allows him to break character and simply stare out into the auditorium as if to say “Can you believe what things I have to say and do?”  In 1996 Christopher Newton gave Heath Lamberts long periods of improvisation, hilarious in themselves, but so extended one tended to forget the plot.  Kash only gives Glen his few moments and as a result all the many twists of the story are completely clear.

This is the first time I have seen Tim Funnell in such a major role and he is an excellent Charlie Barnet.  Barnet is in the amusing position of trying to juggle all the bizarre events that involve the various Hickory Woods while trying to shape them to his advantage.  Inevitably he repeatedly falls back on the superior knowledge of Jugg who supplies a solution to the problem of the moment.  Funnell is great at mining the humour of Barnet’s character as it constantly wavers between triumph and chagrin, his pride slowly being chipped away as he is forced to admit he alone can’t control the situation.

As Jugg, the éminence grise of the action, David Leyshon is a constant delight as he displays Jugg’s complete unflappability and cool superiority.  Stratford veteran Brian Tree, making his first appearance with Drayton, makes Jonathan Hardcastle into a more rounded character than usual and his ploy to honour his business partner has a ring of real sentiment.  In many ways Tree’s character becomes an alternative audience, one who hasn’t seen all the machinations that have led to the bizarre world around him and who shows us how far we come in accepting crazed behaviour as normal.

Kyle Golemba, in a non-singing-and-dancing role for a change, shows us that Clifton Weaver is a bit too slick to be up to any good.  When Weaver’s game is finally revealed, Golemba lashes out in a frightening nastiness that his well-groomed exterior had only partially hidden.  Douglas E. Hughes, once a familiar face at the Shaw Festival, has a fine comic turn as Hardcastle’s solicitor Arnold Piper, who is so enamoured with Hardcastle’s sister Amy that he hilariously romances one of the Hickory Woods who happens to dressed up as Amy.

Among the women Andrea Risk is perfect as nagging, self-important Amy and is especially funny and physically flexible in the scene where Amy allows herself to be posed for her portrait.  Amanda Leigh is ideally cast as Billy’s wife Winnie and like Brian Tree provides us with the bewildered point of view of a person innocent of all the scheming of how mad the world on stage has become.  As Cynthia, Sarah Higgins is a typical farce ingenue for the first half of the play until her character is let in on the situation.  Then her character grows and Higgins shows that Cynthia rather enjoys having an excuse to lie and plot so brazenly.

As with the other successful farces she has directed, Kash treats the play almost as a musical score, shaping the action masterfully as a gradual crescendo reaching one climax at the end of Act 1 and an even greater climax at the end of Act 2.  If the chaos of the outside world has you down, leave it behind for a couple hours and revel in a theatrical world where mayhem is so beautifully and enjoyably under control.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Sarah Higgins as Cynthia, Douglas E. Hughes as Piper, Eddie Glen as Billy, Tim Funnell Barnet and David Leyshon as Jugg; Eddie Glen as Billy and Sarah Higgins as Cynthia; Andrea Rick as Amy, Tim Funnell as Barnet and Eddie Glen as Billy. ©2017 Liisa Steinwedel.

For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com.