Review - Run for Your Wife - Drayton Entertainment, Cambridge

✭✭✭✭✩

by Ray Cooney, directed by Marcia Kash

Drayton Entertainment, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge

April 16-May 4, 2014;

King’s Wharf Theatre, Penetanguishene

June 25-July 12, 2014;

Playhouse II, Grand Bend

July 16-August 2, 2014

Stanley to John: “And you just flit between Wimbledon and Streatham like some sort of over-sexed bumble bee, do you?”

Now that spring has finally sprung, it seems fitting to celebrate with a classic British farce like Run for Your Wife. Director Marcia Kash leads a top-notch cast in a production that is so funny you will find it hard to catch your breath between laughs.

When the play opened in Guildford in 1982, playwright Ray Cooney himself played the central role of John Smith, here played to perfection by David Leyshon. The play transferred to London in 1983 where it continued to run for the next nine years, earning the record as the longest-running comedy in the West End. People tend to think of farce as involving lots of running about and slamming of doors. Run for Your Wife is much more sophisticated than that and is as inventive in its use of space as it is in its use of language.

What confronts you when you enter the theatre is an open set by David Anscherl that is split right down the middle – the stage left side all in pink and the stage left side all in powder blue. The pink side has more old-fashioned furniture, a window with curtains and a cabinet full of knick-knacks. The blue side is more sleekly modern with a window with venetian blinds and a poster of Bob Geldof’s Live-Aid concert of 1985. Downstage centre is a two-seat sofa cleverly upholstered so that it fits in with the two different décors.

The action begins when two women enter from opposite sides and begin pacing about in their respective spaces oblivious to each other’s existence. This signals immediately that the colourfully divided stage represents two separate apartments. As we soon discover, the pink side is the flat in Wimbledon of Mary Smith (Susie Burnett), who wears a simple floral one-piece dress that ties in with her old-fashioned décor. The blue side is the flat in Streatham of Barbara Smith (Stacy Smith), who wears a skimpy but frilly blue negligée that ties in with her décor. Both women finally pick up the phones in their respective spaces to report simultaneously to the police that their husband, taxi-driver John Smith, has gone missing.

Yes, as it turns out, John Smith is married to both Mary and Barbara. When he comes home to Mary, he confesses this to Stanley (Michael Lamport), the neighbour who lives above them. It is already amusing that such a mild-mannered, unassuming guy as John should have such a big secret but, as he tells Stanley, four months after he married Mary, Barbara was a fare who invited him for tea and when after several tea-times she proposed, he didn’t want to let her down. Up to now he has kept his life organized according to a strict schedule so that he spends the same amount of time with each wife.

Recent events, however, have completely upset his schedule. He stopped his cab to help an old woman being attacked by ruffians only to be attacked by the old woman who thought he was one of the ruffians. The attack put him in hospital and has now made him late for his free day with Barbara. Mary, of course, thinks he should stay home and rest.

Detective Sergeant Porterhouse of Wimbledon (Anthony Bekenn) visits Mary and Detective Sergeant Troughton of Streatham (David Talbot) visits Barbara to investigate their missing persons reports, but as the facts begin not to add up, the two continue their investigations. Meanwhile, John begins using Stanley as his primary backup and Stanley eventually has to get used to agreeing with every lie John tells to hide the truth from Mary and Barbara and the two detectives. Stanley even starts adding his own details which John then has to try to incorporate into his ever more elaborate tale.

What is so dizzyingly hilarious is how Cooney so carefully escalates this concatenation of lies. By the end Stanley, Mary and Barbara have all been identified as different people, sometimes several different people, to fit into John’s ramshackle narrative, and it’s a great mental test just to look at the characters on stage and recall just what version of the story each of them knows and just who each of them thinks others are.

It would be very easy for a production of this play to go wrong. Luckily, Drayton Entertainment has put Marcia Kash at the helm, one of the few directors in Canada who understands how farce works, as was so evident in her See How They Run for Theatre Aquarius in 2012. The Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival and Soulpepper have all made disastrous attempts at farce – Stratford with A Fitting Confusion in 1996, Soulpepper with A Flea in Her Ear in 2001 and the Shaw with Hotel Peccadillo in 2007. The mistake in all three cases was in trying to make the play funnier.

Kash, in contrast, proceeds by bringing out the humour already in the play and, most important of all, by making certain that the story is absolutely clear. In Run for Your Wife, where an initially simple excuse expands to elephantine proportions, her emphasis on clarity is exemplary. At no point are we ever in doubt about who knows what and therefore we can enjoy watching to see how many balls of story details the meek juggler John can keep in the air at once. She also directs the play from the characters’ point of view. To them what is happening is deadly serious while from the audience’s perspective it is ridiculous. Indeed, the more earnest the characters’ attitude about their situation, the funnier their situation is to us.

The same is true with Kash’s blocking. The pink and blue sections of the stage are initially divided by an invisible wall, but as the action continues characters from one side move into the other. We come to realize that the set is really two different spaces superimposed on each other. Key to establishing this is making sure the characters in one apartment remain completely oblivious to those in the other. This Kash accomplishes with superb control. As with the narrative, we are never in doubt at any time which character is where.

Kash is blessed with an excellent cast all of whom have a fine sense of comic timing. Leyshon’s portrayal of John as a blithe innocent is already funny. Even funnier are the numerous occasions where he shows us the wheels whirring away in John’s head as he tries to come up with a new lie to cover up a previous one. Michael Lamport is wonderful as an unwilling partner in prevarication. Lamport’s increasingly surprised facial expressions as he tries to adjust himself to each new lie he has to support are hilarious in themselves.

Susie Burnett as the mousy, uptight Mary and Stacy Smith as the superficially wilder Barbara make a great contrast. While Smith’s Barbara becomes increasingly outraged at the bizarre circumstances she has to face, Burnett’s Mary simply has a breakdown and can’t handle the confusion any more. Similarly, Anthony Bekenn and David Talbot make a great pair of contrasting detectives. Bekenn’s Porterhouse is the mellower of the two and amusingly becomes more at ease with the situation the more complicated it gets. Talbot’s Troughton, on the other hand, becomes ever more incensed and determined in ferreting out the truth.

The one remaining character is Bobby Franklyn, Barbara Smith’s neighbour who lives above her. Cooney describes him in the dramatis personae as “A flamboyant dress designer of indeterminate age”. What this really means is that he is gay. Bobby lives with his boyfriend and business partner Cyril, who is also a dressmaker. Cooney’s depiction of Bobby is terriblly dated, but not irredeemably so. Fortunately, while costume designer Nicole Del Cul has put him in bright colours, Marcia Kash and actor Aidan deSalaiz have significantly turned down the flamboyance factor and banished clichés such as lisping and limp wrists so that Bobby appears as just one type of gay man rather than a stereotype of all gay men. This approach has the positive effect of throwing the humour of the other men’s rampant homophobia right back at them. Kash and deSalaiz make sure we don’t laugh at Bobby but at the other men’s extreme reactions to him and to the very idea of homosexuality.

This is an intelligent, smartly acted and directed farce that deserves to be a great success. Shaw Festival Artistic Director Christopher Newton always used to say that farce was the most difficult of all theatrical genres to pull off since it is so completely dependent on pace, timing and attitude. Under director Marcia Kash the lie-upon-lie structure of Cooney’s play becomes like an enormous narrative Jenga game that keeps us in suspense wondering until the very last second when John and Stanley’s tower of prevarications is going to come crashing down, since we know that if it does there will be a mighty boom. If you’re looking for two hours of pure fun, look no further than this production.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com.

2014-04-22

Run for Your Wife