Theatre review: La Cage aux Folles [The Play]

I've had misjudged or unlikely musical adaptations on the brain recently, and not just because of the obvious suspect - announcements in the last couple of weeks have suggested that Joe diPietro alone is going to be flinging a hell of a lot of insanity at stages both sides of the Atlantic over the next few months. But then there's the other extreme, where a musical adaptation has worked so well it's overshadowed the original: The Jerry Herman / Harvey Fierstein musical is what comes to mind when you hear La Cage aux Folles, to the extent that Park Theatre have felt it best to append [The Play] to the title, to clarify that Simon Callow's new version is based on Jean Poiret's original French farce. Any songs that show up are going to be lip-synced because the title refers to a drag club run by Georges (Michael Matus) in early 1970s St Tropez.

The star turn is his long-term partner Albin (Paul Hunter,) and as the play begins it looks like the biggest problem will be getting him to go on stage in the first place. But a brush with a much less accepting side of society has much sillier consequences.

Georges' son Laurent (Arthur Hughes) wants to marry Muriel (Georgina Ambrey,) daughter of a far-right politician seeking election, but he's not going to get his blessing if he knows the truth about his upbringing. He asks Georges to put on a straight charade and even pretend to still be together with Laurent's absent mother Simone (Sarah Lam.) The harshest request is that he send Albin away for a few days, as the overdramatic drag queen would give the game away. But when the prospective in-laws arrive and Simone is a no-show, Albin steps in to play mother.

This being a farce there's a lot of setup to be done, but Jez Bond's production gets the laughs going early on with a lot of catty back-and-forth between the characters, while the first act belongs largely to Syrus Lowe as Jacob, the houseboy with a minimal understanding of what dressing conservatively might mean. The various permutations of how Jacob can turn up wearing basically nothing are also the highlight of Tim Shortall's design, which is otherwise fine but suffers slightly from a fringe budget not being able to rise to heights quite as ridiculous as the characters. Matus is a dab hand at the tricky job of keeping the whole thing together while he appears to be falling apart, especially once we get to the second act and all the setup of things that could go wrong falls together. There's a lot of big laughs throughout, even if this never reaches the hysterical point the best farces can manage.

Of course what was daringly progressive in 1973 can date badly by 2020, but while the basic concept of getting laughs out of a gay man having to wipe all traces of his sexuality out of his life is problematic, La Cage aux Folles bears up surprisingly well in how it deals with it. While Hughes plays Laurent largely sympathetic the play never treats his request as anything other than a dick move, and there's a real sadness to Georges and Albin's sense of betrayal. And when the parents arrive Simon Hepworth and Louise Bangay* play them with a genuine chilly nastiness. In fact for me it takes away from the supposed happy ending that their only comeuppance is a temporary humiliation - it struck me that if he got into power M. Priedieu would only come down even harder on people like his in-laws because of his experience, which is probably a more bitter aftertaste that was actually intended.

Seeing La Cage aux Folles without the songs does expose Poiret's plotting as not being as tight as it could be - the drunk accountant Tabaro (Peter Straker) turning up mid-meal for no reason is a pretty clumsy way to up the stakes. But Bond's production makes the most of what's there, and while it doesn't come across as one of the all-time great farces it's an entertaining couple of hours, whose heartfelt treatment of the sadness under the comedy means it's aged surprisingly well.

La Cage aux Folles [The Play] by Jean Poiret in a version by Simon Callow is booking until the 21st of March at Park Theatre 200.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Douet.

*talk about nominative determinism - I guess if your surname's Ban Gay you're destined to play a vicious homophobe