Theatre review: Dr. Strangelove

Welp, October's been a busy theatrical month for me and certainly one with a certain prevailing tone - the odd dud among a very high rate of great shows, but good or bad there's definitely been a pretty dark side to everything I've seen. Even the funnier shows have had a touch of bleakness to them, so it's fitting that I end on the play with easily the biggest hit rate of laughs this month; but it gets them from the total annihilation of all life on earth. A long-awaited West End event - tickets went on sale over a year in advance - Armando Iannuci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan one-upping Peter Sellers in the film by playing all four roles Sellers had originally been slated to play: Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Major Kong and the titular character, a German scientist who's definitely glad to have changed sides after the War - the fact that his bionic right arm keeps trying to do a Nazi salute is neither here nor there.

Theatre review: The Crown Jewels

I guess the summer holidays are silly season for more than just the news cycle; either that or with the post-pandemic economy still affecting the UK's stages, there really is no guessing what's going to end up on them next. At the Garrick that means The Crown Jewels, a play by Simon Nye - best known as a TV writer - about the real events of 1671 when a small gang led by Colonel Blood (Aidan McArdle) botched an attempt to steal the Crown Jewels which British monarchs wear at their coronations. To be honest this was a show I was more than a little dubious about, but booked for pretty much because of some of the cast. And at first the broader-than-broad performances of Sean Foley's production made me wonder if I'd make it past the interval. But while I can't say I grew to love it, it definitely helped once I'd made the connection "oh, it's a panto."

Stage-to-screen review: The Play What I Wrote

As usual January has some lulls in theatregoing that I'm topping up with filmed productions I missed the first time. and one BBC iPlayer offering leftover from the Christmas schedule seems a pretty appropriate choice for the time of year, even if it wasn't specifically festive: Morecambe and Wise were a comedy duo and beloved British institution, and particularly in the 1970s their Christmas special was always the most-watched show, fondly remembered to this day. (I'm sure it creates an annual bind for the BBC - if they don't show an episode they'll get complaints about breaking with tradition, if they do they'll get them about flooding the schedules with reruns.) I'm sure we did get a showing of the real thing, but a good compromise between new and old is this filming of the 2021 revival of Sean Foley, Hamish McColl and Eddie Braben's tribute The Play What I Wrote, inspired by Braben's original scripts.

Theatre review: The Man in the White Suit

Sean Foley’s comic instincts have never been infallible (remember Ducktastic? I certainly don’t, it closed with unseemly haste before I could see it) but I do seem to be disappointed with his work more often lately. Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense was one of his bigger hits a few years ago, but teaming up again with its star Stephen Mangan hasn’t really recaptured that magic as they bring Roger MacDougall, John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit to the stage. Mangan plays Sidney Stratton, a lab technician at a Lancashire textile mill in the 1950s, who keeps blowing things up in his attempts to create a revolutionary new kind of material. When he gets fired from Corland’s (Ben Deery) factory he wangles his way into rival mill owner Burnley’s (Richard Cordery) lab, where he finally comes up with a fabric that never deteriorates, loses its shape or even gets dirty.

Non-review: The Miser

Professional reviewers get most of the perks but there's one reserved for those of us who pay for our tickets: The right to make a run for it at the halfway point without feeling guilty about it*. So I can't call this a review of the whole of Molière's The Miser, loosely adapted by Sean Foley and Phil Porter, and directed by the former. I didn't actually hate it - if I had I'd probably have stuck it out so I could rip it to shreds with all the information to hand - I just knew by the interval that there was little to be gained from sticking around. In a production that appears to have been cast by watching a week's worth of repeats on Dave, Griff Rhys Jones plays the titular Harpagon, whose children won't see a penny while he's alive, which is a problem as they've both fallen for poorer people: Daughter Elise (Katy Wix) loves butler Valere (Matthew Horne) and son Cleante (Ryan Gage) their neighbour Marianne (Ellie White.)

Theatre review: The Dresser

Ronald Harwood is best-known for his contribution to the field of gibbering misogyny, but he also wrote some plays. Sean Foley's new production of the best-known one, The Dresser, comes to London after a short out-of-town tryout, and follows a co-dependent relationship over the course of one night during World War II. For the last 16 years Norman (Reece Shearsmith) has been personal dresser to the grand old stage actor Sir (Ken Stott,) a fairly well-respected name but appaently not enough to ever get the knighthood he desperately wants. They're currently on their latest leg of an endless regional tour of Shakespearean rep, with a company largely made up of the elderly and injured because all the professional young actors are in the army. Tonight's performance is King Lear, but Sir has gone missing.

Theatre review: The Painkiller

Déjà vu tonight as, only a couple of nights after Miss Atomic Bomb, another show goes through all the motions to make me laugh and fails spectacularly. That show had the word "bomb" right there in the title, just like Francis Veber's The Painkiller has the word "pain" to describe what it'd be like watching it. The fourth show in the SirKenBranCo season (the third was a revival of Red Velvet, which I'd already seen first time round,) Sean Foley adapts and directs a production originally seen in Belfast a few years ago. Alice Power's set is the familiar farce setup of two adjoining hotel rooms, the communicating doors left unlocked because plot. In the room on the left is Ralph (SirKenBran,) a hit-man who's chosen it as the window offers the perfect shot for the assassination he's got planned. Next door is Dudley (Rob Brydon,) in London to try and make up with his estranged wife Michelle (Claudie Blakley.)

Theatre review: I Can't Sing!

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: No idea when the producers are going to risk letting the critics in for this one.

All the press about new musical I Can't Sing! has focused on the fact that it's got songs by Glen Ponder from Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. OK, so strictly speaking none of the press has been about that - they seem to be more interested in the fact that it's a show about The X Factor and has a book by Harry Hill. But it's also true that Steve Brown, who was better known in the mid-nineties as the sidekick whose house band had a different name every week, has brought his musical Savoir Faire to composing the show's songs. All the signs building up to I Can't Sing! were less than promising, from the early previews cancelled due to technical issues to the most worrying fact of all - that this is an official X Factor spin-off, fully authorised and approved by Simon Cowell. To be honest I was planning on skipping this one, but the casting of Nigel Harman as Simon meant my sister wanted to see it as a late Christmas present.

Theatre review: Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense

Following regional tours, a couple of high-profile comedies are landing in the West End in the run-up to Christmas, and first up are a duo as quintessentially English as the word "quintessentially." I can only take P.G. Wodehouse in small doses, but those doses can be pretty inspired, and his most famous creations are Jeeves and Wooster. Based on various Wodehouse stories, the Goodale Brothers' Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense sees upper-class twit Bertie Wooster (Stephen Mangan) attempt a one-man show in which he intends to regale the audience with one of his ludicrous misadventures. His determination to go it alone barely lasts a couple of minutes before he needs his trusty valet Jeeves (Matthew Macfadyen) to bail him out as usual. From keeping the story on track, to playing supporting characters and even building the set, Jeeves has to run the show.

Theatre review: A Mad World My Masters

The title feels very familiar to me but apparently A Mad World My Masters' performance history doesn't quite match its fame: Sean Foley's production for the RSC is a rare chance to see Thomas Middleton's Jacobean sex comedy, a play whose relentless series of single and double entendres makes the Carry On films look chaste and reserved. There's two distinct plots: Dick Follywit (Richard Goulding) stands to inherit the fortune of his uncle Sir Bounteous Peersucker (Ian Redford) upon his death. But he's not prepared to wait that long and, with his friends Oboe (Harry McEntire) and Sponger (Ben Deery,) he sets off on a number of ridiculous schemes to part the old fool from his money. Elsewhere, Mr Littledick (Steffan Rhodri) is insanely suspicious of his wife's fidelity - with good reason, as Mrs Littledick (Ellie Beaven) is in lust with Penitent Brothel (John Hopkins,) who's got plots of his own to get her into bed.

Theatre review: What the Butler Saw

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This one opens to the press next week.

Farce is definitely back in fashion at the moment and the latest classic to get a revival is Joe Orton's typically twisted take on the genre, What the Butler Saw. Sean Foley, fresh from success with The Ladykillers, directs a cast of familiar faces at the Vaudeville. Tim McInnerny is Dr Prentice, the randy head of a psychiatric clinic, whose interview of potential new secretary Geraldine (Georgia Moffett) includes a full medical checkup, for which they will both need to remove some clothing. When his wife (Samantha Bond) arrives unexpectedly, Geraldine becomes only the first of a number of half-naked people Prentice will end up trying to hide, soon to be joined by Nicholas (Nick Hendrix,) the bell-boy from a seedy nearby hotel, and Sergeant Match (Jason Thorpe,) who's looking into crimes Geraldine and Nicholas may be connected with. The final complication is Dr Rance (Omid Djalili,) here to inspect the clinic, but mainly concerned with interpreting the various dodgy goings-on in terms of bizarre mental illnesses he can put into a book.