Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✩✩
by Marc Camoletti, translated by Beverley Cross & Francis Evans, directed by Marcia Kash
Drayton Entertainment, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge
August 15-30, 2014
Bernard: “The whole secret is order. I am organized – beautifully organized”
Earlier this year Drayton Entertainment presented the British farce Run for Your Wife (1983) by Ray Cooney about a kind-hearted bigamist with two wives in different parts of London. Now Drayton has opened the classic French farce Boeing Boeing (1960) by Marc Camoletti about a calculating lothario who has three fiancées, all of who are air hostesses. It is probably a mistake to present two plays with such similar premises in the same season since it doesn’t matter much whether one man is juggling two wives or three fiancées. The plays invite comparisons and in this case Boeing Boeing, despite a fine cast and crisp direction, just does not reach the delirious heights of humour of Run for Your Wife.
Boeing Boeing was a major success when it premiered in 1960 in Paris. Then Beverley Cross translated it into English in 1962 and the farce ran for seven years in the West End but it flopped in New York in 1965. Interest in the play was renewed when Matthew Warchus directed a highly acclaimed revival in the West End in 2007. The 2008 Broadway version, revised by Francis Evans but directed by Warchus, won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Drayton is presenting the 2008 Broadway version and that is one source of its problems.
In Beverley Cross’s translation, the play concerns the French architect Bernard, who believes he has hit on the perfect scheme for having three mistresses. All three are stewardesses recommended to him by a friend at Paris’s Orly Airport near which he lives. By using an international flight timetable Bernard selected which three to pursue based on their mutually exclusive flight commitments. Only one hostess at a time would ever be with him in Paris while the other two would be flying the globe.
Colluding with him in this scheme is his surly French maid Bertha, who is nearing the end of her tether with the complicated dining arrangements Bernard’s scheme entails. Into these machinations that have so far been running like clockwork, comes Robert, an old school chum of Bernard’s, who has come up from Aix-en-Provence to visit him. Robert is thus the proverbial naive, wide-eyed country mouse who is new to the ways of the city and especially to his friend’s unapologetic philandering. Inevitably, the three stewardesses meet, Bernard’s scheme fails and Robert finds himself forced to lie and pretend in ways he didn’t know he was capable of.
In an age when flight delays and cancellations are commonplace, it is very hard for us to accept the basic premise of Camoletti’s play. Even if we remember that there were far fewer long-distance flights in the 1960s than there are now and only one airport (Aéroport de Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle did not open until 1974), flying was still subject to so many variables that the success of Bernard’s scheme seems improbable. The key to making the premise work is in admitting this fact and emphasizing that it is Bernard’s hubris that makes him think his scheme is “perfect” and only good luck that has made it succeed as long as it has. Bernard’s belief in the infallibility of the timetable is like the monomania of Molière’s central characters and is meant to mark him out for disaster. Unfortunately, director Marcia Kash and James Kall as Bernard never make this point clear so that it seems we are meant to believe in Bernard’s scheme which in turn strains our credibility.
For the 2008 Broadway version Francis Evans Americanized the action which makes the play seem even more artificial. Now Bernard is an American architect who somehow is resident in Paris. Robert is now no longer from rural France but rural America, namely Wisconsin, and is visiting Bernard on his way to see relatives in Aix-en-Provence. Why such an unsophisticated person as Robert should be undertaking his first trip out of Wisconsin just now is never explained. The Drayton production adds to the confusion by making Bertha a British rather than a French maid, who somehow “came with” the Paris apartment when Bernard moved in. With a hard-to-accept premise to begin with, it would be far better to make everything else simple and keep these three characters French as they were in the original and in Beverley Cross’s translation.
The most notable difference in comparing Boeing Boeing to Run for Your Wife is the near-total lack of verbal comedy in the former. Boeing Boeing has lots of physical comedy and satire of the national stereotypes of the stewardesses, but far too often a character will speak a line that seems like the ideal set-up for a joke only to fizzle with a limp reply. Unlike Run for Your Wife there is very little quid pro quo, virtually no wordplay and, strangely enough for a French farce, no doubles entendres. One result is that the actors tend to become overemphatic in order to make up for the lack of richness in the dialogue.
The primary reason to see the play is the hilarious performance of Keith Savage as Robert. Robert is the only character we care about and Savage makes him lovably naive and slightly dimwitted. Savage gives us the feeling that Robert is operating at the very maximum of is mental capacity when he is in the thick of trying to hide the presence of one stewardess from another. His funniest moments come when two of the stewardesses start to become attracted to him. A great physical comedian, Savage goes into some of the most extravagant physical contortions to express the ecstasy he experiences when the American stewardess Gloria shows him the art of kissing.
James Kall’s performance as Bernard is perfectly efficient but he falls into the trap of trying to make the character likeable when even Robert recognizes what he is doing is immoral. In fact, the more of an utter cad Bernard is, the more humour we would feel in relishing his downfall.
Even though it makes no sense for Bernard to have a British maid, Valerie Boyle is still very funny as Bertha. Habituated to her employer’s ways, Bertha is much quicker than Robert in knowing how to back up the lies Bernard tells to cover his tracks. Boyle’s funniest scene comes when she scandalizes Robert by her lax ways and backtalk when Robert is absent.
The three stewardesses are well cast. Katie Lawson fills Gloria, the TWA hostess with a vitality and confidence that seem typically American. Sarah Mennell is ideal as the sultry, sensual Alitalia hostess Gabriella, who is so easily prone to jealousy and anger. Jackie Mustakas focusses on the moodiness, inflexibility and emotional intensity of the Lufthansa hostess Gretchen, but in playing such a vehement character Mustakas is herself often in danger of going over the top.
Designer Ivan Brozic has created a handsome neoclassical set whose seen doors cry out “farce” right from the start. He has furnished it with a Barcelona chair, a bean bag chair and Danish Modern hanging lamps that immediately conjure up the 1960s. Costume designer Jessica Bray has followed the example of previous productions of the play, including the 2007 revival, by dressing the three stewardesses in uniforms in bright primary colours – red for the American, blue for the Italian and yellow of the German – to contrast completely with the mousy browns of Robert’s sweater vest and tweeds.
There’s no doubt that Drayton’s Boeing Boeing is an amusing way to spend two and a half hours, but the dodgy premise and the lack of verbal humour to complement the physical humour does not deliver the side-splitting laughter of a farce like Run for Your Wife. Camoletti’s Boeing Boeing makes one hope that Drayton returns to Ray Cooney in the future.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) James Kall as Bernard and Keith Savage as Robert; Keith Savage, Katie Lawson as Gloria and James Kall. ©2014 Hillary Camillieri.
For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com.
2014-08-18
Boeing Boeing