Theatre review: The Knight of the Burning Pestle

In Francis Beaumont’s The London Merchant, Jasper (Kirill Chernyshenko) is in love with his master’s daughter Luce (Anna Vardevanian,) but their plans to elope are thwarted at every turn by both her parents and his. Except the biggest obstacle to their being together isn’t actually a part of their own story, because The London Merchant doesn’t exist, except as the play-within-a-play that gets disrupted in Beaumont’s proto-postmodernist The Knight of the Burning Pestle. When I saw the Swanamaker production a few years ago I loved its inspired, multi-layered silliness and the feeling that the play was centuries ahead of its time so much I went back for seconds, which made the prospect of director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, a team who deliver eccentric and chaotic results at the best of times, tackling it something to look forward to.

This time it’s the turn of Cheek by Jowl’s Russian company, with a cast from Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre, to return to London and present the play in a heavily edited Russian translation that makes it more bonkers than ever, and frequently hilarious.

Beaumont’s original has a number of targets but The London Merchant in particular satirises the “city comedies” that were in vogue at the time, and Donnellan and Ormerod update that to an almost-bare Barbican stage, save for a central white box on which live video of the actors is projected as they slowly and portentously bring chairs onto the stage. (And if this seems to be particularly targeting Ivo van Hove and Jan Versweyveld’s aesthetic, the angry cello-playing reminiscent of Cheek by Jowl’s last Russian production shows they’re not beyond turning the joke on themselves.) It’s shamelessly pretentious and utterly dull, and within minutes the Grocer (Alexander Feklistov) and his Wife (Agrippina Steklova) have had enough, wandering onto the stage to politely but firmly ask that everyone gets to the interesting part, where a knight comes on and have adventures.

The fact that the play doesn’t feature anything of the sort isn’t a problem, as their nephew Rafe (Nazar Safonov) is also in the audience, and will be happy to improvise something. Tim (Kirill Sbitnev) plays along as the Knight’s squire in an attempt to get rid of them all, but soon he ends up getting sucked into the adventures, as do Mrs Merrythought (Anna Karmakova) and Michael (Danila Kazakov,) whose roles would be particularly dreary and thankless if they stuck to the script. In fact – and I’ve only got the one other production to compare it to so I’m no expert – it seemed to me the most obvious cuts to the script to bring it in under two hours were to the titular Knight’s story, Rafe only occasionally bursting in to wreak havoc in increasingly elaborate ways, but Safonov’s mix of enthusiasm and confusion makes every one of these appearances count.

Judging by the surtitles translating the show back to English, it’s the play-within-a-play that’s been kept the most faithful to the original, highlighting the fact that Beaumont was creating something deliberately dull to build his mayhem around. The main focus of the comedy is on the interruptions by the Grocer and particularly the Wife, who when she realises Jasper’s love rival Humphrey (Andrei Kuzichev) is played by one of her favourite TV actors is instantly star-struck, interrupting the show again to get an autograph, and calling him “cupcake” for the rest of the evening. Her other interruptions include telling Luce to put her knickers back on, attacking Jasper, telling the characters plot points they’re not supposed to know yet and, inevitably, answering a call on her mobile (she couldn’t find the Beckham T-shirt her friend wanted her to get, they’re seeing this show because they couldn’t get into The Lion King, and she’s got to go now because roaming is expensive.)

Vardevanian is game as a Luce whose simpering performance the Wife doesn’t think much of and mocks, and by the end the stage invader has made her case for all the women in the play to rise up against the clichéd, subservient roles they’ve been given. With the play-within-a-play made particularly egregious, the production’s sympathies are squarely with the Grocer and his Wife, but Donnellan manages to inject a bit of darkness into even something as silly as this – by the end, as the interlopers break their promise to let the actors finish the play and force them into a jolly dance finale, the suggestion has definitely crept in that the joke has gone too far. It’s a good joke while it lasts though, and although CbJ’s adaptation loses all the nuance of how the play’s three layers of reality interact with each other, throwing every gag they can think of at the stage makes up for it in big laughs.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont is booking until the 8th of June at the Barbican Theatre; then continuing on tour to Moscow and Gdańsk.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.