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by Ray Cooney & Tony Hilton, directed by Chris Abraham

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 9–October 11, 2026

Rupert: “When I first arrived I said I was who I was. When I met you I had to say I was who I wasn’t”

In 2024 the modern British farce One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) was a huge hit for the Shaw Festival. This year the Festival has hired much of the same cast and creative team behind that hit for the classic British farce One for the Pot (1961) by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton. The new show is likely to be a huge hit again though it must be admitted One for the Pot does not play with quite the same effortlessness as did One Man, Two Guvnors.

One for the Pot was last seen in Ontario in an excellent production directed by Marcia Kash for Drayton Entertainment in 2017. In my review of that production, I summarized the plot thus: “All the typical confusion of the farce stems from one man simply trying to do a good deed. The wealthy Jonathan Hardcastle 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 day for Billy to arrive has come and happens to coincide with the lavish birthday party Hardcastle is holding for his daughter Cynthia. The simpleton Billy does present himself along with Charlie Barnet, who poses as Billy’s solicitor, because he smells a way to enrich himself. Unbeknownst to Billy and Barnet, Billy has an identical twin brother, Rupert, who was raised separately from Billy and in contrast to Billy’s north country accent has a posh British accent. When Cynthia and Rupert fall in love, Charlie sees another path to the Hardcastle wealth, the problem being that Billy is already married. Just when things have become impossibly complex, it turns out the identical twins were really identical triplets when a third Hickory Wood arrives, this one Irish and as good a trickster as Charlie”.

When last staged at the Shaw Festival in 1985, One for the Pot was clearly intended as a vehicle for the incomparable Heath Lamberts as the identical triplets. This time the show is clearly intended as a vehicle for Peter Fernandes, who was so brilliant as the titular “man” in One Man, Two Guvnors. The two plays, however, though both farces, work in very different ways. In OMTG, the central comic character actively takes on his role as servant to two masters and is also a narrator who serves as a link between the action of the play and the audience. In One for the Pot, none of the three Hickory Woods instigates action so much as are acted upon. Director Chris Abraham, who also directed OMTG, seems to realize this. As a result, though Fernandes has the virtuoso role, Sanjay Talwar as the butler Jugg and Martin Happer as Hickory’s supposed “solicitor” Barnet are as important to the comedy as Fernandes is since they are the principal movers of the action.

Chris Abraham directs the action at a rather breathless pace so the audience cannot waver in its attention if it wants to follow the play’s many plot twists. As he was in OMTG, Peter Fernandes is excellent at playing an innocent being manipulated by others for reasons he does not fully understand. This applies to both the dim, low-class Billy Hickory Wood we first meet and to the intelligent posh Rupert Hickory Wood we meet later. The role of the third triplet, Michael, gives Fernandes a chance to show that he is also adept at playing a nasty, manipulative character. The main difficulty with Fernandes’ performance is that he doesn’t clearly distinguish the triplets as well as he should by their mode of speech. He is most comfortable with Billy’s low-class dialect, but his upper-class mode for Rupert and Irish accent for Michael come and go.

Though playing the Hickory Wood triplets is the play’s showiest role, the faux solicitor Charlie Barnet and the canny butler Jugg have much more prominence in this production. In the Shaw’s renowned first production of the play in 1985, Barry MacGregor as Barnet and David Schurmann as Jugg often stood in the background while the manic genius of Heath Lamberts took centre stage. Here director Chris Abraham restores the action to its true balance where the Hickory Wood triplets are subject to Barnet and Jugg’s increasingly desperate manoeuvres to take a cut of the £10,000 windfall.

Both Martin Happer as Barnet and Sanjay Talwar as Jugg have one of the finest showcases ever for their comic talents. Happer communicates from the start that he is merely an opportunist. The humour snowballs as Happer has Barnet try not to reveal his panic as one of his schemes after another comes to ruin. Barnet even switches from Billy to Rupert when it starts to seem more likely that Rupert will be declared the heir. Meanwhile, Talwar wrings comedy from Jugg’s imperturbable sang-froid in the face of Barnet’s anxiety.

One aspect of the play that does not work as it should is the relationship between Jonathan Hardcastle and his sister Amy. In the Drayton production of 2017, director Marcia Kash got this point completely right. Kash imagined Amy as an imperious battle-axe who dominates her reprobate brother Jonathan. This approach makes sense of Jonathan’s many surreptitious methods of drinking and smoking which Amy strictly forbids him to do. It also makes the lawyer Arnold Piper’s wooing of Amy more humorous since we wonder why a man would willingly seek to ally himself with such a termagant.

Fiona Byrne plays Amy as generally befuddled which hardly suggests that Jonathan should fear her, while Patrick Galligan acts as if he has to hide his habits from Amy even though Byrne’s Amy is far from domineering.

In smaller roles, Camille Eanga-Selenge is charming and justifiably confused as Cynthia Hardcastle, who is instantly smitten with Rupert only to encounter him at various times with completely different accents and personalities. Kelly Wong is suitably snobbish as the artist Clifton Weaver, while Neil Barclay is comic as the lawyer Arnold Piper whose goes all wobbly whenever he sees Amy. Jade Repeta plays Winnie, the low-class Billy Hickory Wood’s low-class wife, but her overly dramatic manner and piercing voice soon become tiresome.

One of Abraham’s most positive ideas is to have a steady stream of guests arrive and pass across the upstage playing area. The events of the play all take place on the occasion of Cynthia’s birthday party and the constant arrivals remind us of this fact and of the fact that Jonathan’s private plan to reward the true Hickory Wood will have public consequences.

Unlike Abraham’s staging of OMTG, his approach shows signs of attempting to make an already hilarious play funnier. In contrast to the sedate single-layer birthday cake Amy entered with in the 1985 production, Abraham burdens Amy with a perilously tall three-tier cake which means we focus on the cake rather than on what Amy is saying. On a larger scale, Michael Gianfrancesco’s set does humorously reproduce the kind of Victorian clutter one might find in the less stately stately homes of Britain, but the sheer amount of bric-à-brac makes it harder to focus on the most important actions. In contrast the 1985 production imagined the Hardcastle in a restrained Georgian style which thus created a neutral backdrop for all the complex goings-on.

In terms of the action itself, Abraham seems to have added far more incidents of people bumping into the furniture or into other people than I remember from other productions. This is a farce where we do not need any distractions from the already complicated plot.

For those lucky enough to have seen it, the Shaw’s 1985 staging of One for the Pot, or its 1995 remount in Toronto, it will remain the funniest production of a classic British farce they have ever seen. Nevertheless, the present Shaw production is very funny and it is great to see Martin Happer give one of his best-ever performances. This is a worthy follow-up to One Man, Two Guvnors, and if you enjoyed that play, you surely will enjoy this.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Martin Happer as Charlie Barnet, Camille Eanga-Selenge as Cynthia Hardcastle and Peter Fernandes as Billy Hickory Wood; Sanjay Talwar as Jugg, Martin Happer as Charlie Barnet and Peter Fernandes as Rupert Hickory Wood; Peter Fernandes as Rupert Hickory Wood, Martin Happer as Charlie Barnet and Jade Repeta as Winnie; Patrick Galligan as Jonathan Hardcastle and Sanjay Talwar as Jugg; Sanjay Talwar as Jugg, Peter Fernandes as Billy Hickory Wood, Patrick Galligan as Jonathan Hardcastle, Camille Eanga-Selenge as Cynthia Hardcastle, Neil Barclay as Arnold Piper and Martin Happer as Charlie Barnet. © 2026 Michael Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.