Theatre review: The False Servant

Paul Miller is coming up to his final season as Artistic Director of the Orange Tree, a theatre he notoriously took over on the day it lost all its funding. He turned its fortunes around with an eclectic menu of surprisingly ambitious new work alternating with reliable classics, predominantly from Rattigan and Shaw, and it'll be interesting to see how far his successor Tom Littler will want to tinker with a successful formula. One thing I won't miss if they go in the new regime are Miller's occasional ventures to 18th century France for the comedies of Pierre Marivaux, which between The Lottery of Love and the latest offering, The False Servant, haven't exactly got my pulse racing. A wealthy young woman (Lizzy Watts) is contemplating a potential suitor, but wants to be sure of his character. Disguising herself as a man and calling herself The Chevalier, she befriends Lelio (Julian Moore-Cook) and immediately finds out why she should avoid the match at all costs.

Lelio is engaged to The Countess (Phoebe Pryce,) but wants out of it to marry this new heiress who's twice as rich, and who he can send away somewhere once he's got her cash. He asks the Chevalier for help breaking off the engagement, not realising that his new confidante is the very woman he's planning to rip off.

But she agrees to help him, only so she can save the Countess from the same fate and leave Lelio with no victims to exploit, and so in her disguise she agrees to seduce the Countess so she'll break off the engagement herself. To me the most interesting thing about The False Servant is how Marivaux' plot is like a reverse Twelfth Night, if Viola was actually trying to turn Olivia off Orsino and onto herself. But in its own right it rarely hits any comic beats.

I guess with this type of farcical comedy I expect the characters to have a pretty convoluted but clearly defined plan, and for the comedy to come from the way it goes off the rails and they try to wrest back control of it. But apart from the fact that Lelio's a wrong'un and the Chevalier wants to keep him from plundering a woman's inheritance, it's nevertheless particularly clear what the details of the plan are. There's a pretty small cast of characters, meaning the action never gets particularly frenetic, and whether it's Marivaux' story, Martin Crimp's translation or Miller's production, it rarely comes to life.

The few occasions when it does raise a laugh tend to involve Lelio, his servant Arlequin (Silas Wyatt-Barke) and the Chevalier's servant Trivelin (Will Brown,) who all get weirdly turned on by the vaguest description of all the flirting going on. It's a kind of surreally inventive approach that might have served the whole play better if it had been applied more liberally, and a dig at the ridiculousness of the male characters. But just in case there was any risk that Marivaux might be giving a proto-feminist take on the way women's lack of rights over their own money leaves them open to exploitation, we get a rather callous ending when the Countess discovers the man she's fallen in love with doesn't exist, and the Chevalier tells her if she's had her heart broken by being caught in the crossfire of a convoluted plot*, it's her fault for having emotions.

The titular false servant is the the Chevalier, who's told Trivelin that she's her own servant in disguise as a man (the fact that she's a woman is a secret almost everyone seems to get let in on immediately.) Trivelin himself is a former nobleman who's lost all his money and been reduced to serving others. These plot points, like many others, are carefully set up, then forgotten and have absolutely no bearing on anything that happens. The actual plot mainly revolves around debts and contracts, and I'm sure there's a way to entertain me with those, but this isn't it.

The False Servant by Pierre Marivaux in a version by Martin Crimp is booking until the 23rd of July at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours including interval.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.

*as opposed to, oh I don't know, just telling her her fiancé is planning to rip her off