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Laughs at
a rollicking gallop
See How They Run
Belgrade Theatre
****
PICTURE the scene - the living room of an old vicarage which cockney Ida
the maid, (Francesca Mills) kicks off by cleaning. This is
the traditional setting for this traditional and great classic British
farce of mistaken identity, lots of clerics, and inexplicable exposure
of underwear. We start with retired actress
Penelope Toop (Rachel Denning), eccentric wife to main character Rev
Lionel Toop (Warwick Davis), practising her scales in the room above and
does she need to! Visitor Clive Winton (Phil
Holden), her old actor buddy and she are rehearsing the hilarious fight
scene from Noel Coward’s Private Lives but unfortunately stalwart
(and scold) of the county set Miss Skillon (Francesca Papagno) has
arrived unannounced and furious in the vicarage but has been knocked
unconscious by a hefty blow from Clive. She might have arrived steaming
with anger but steaming of a different sort is the outcome! Efforts to
revive her with copious amount s of cooking sherry by Ida prove
misguided so she’s defly deposited in the broom cupboard, an
architectural feature that proves its worth throughout the play!. An intruder, a German prisoner
of war (Raymond Griffiths) disguises himself as a vicar in Toop’s robes,
leaving him in his underwear for the rest of the play. In the end
Sergeant Major Towers (Peter Bonner) arrives to search for his spy to
discover half the cast dressed as bickering vicars, and some undressed,
and the rest either drunk and incapable or in the broom cupboard. If you are just going to see
the comic genius that is Warwick Davis, you are in danger of missing a
vast amount of talent on the rest of the stage. However, it has to be
said that Ida the maid stole the show despite the vamping eccentricities
of Penelope Toop. So this new company, Reduced
Height Theatre Company, set up by Warwick Davis to showcase the talents
of a neglected range of talents, has done us a good turn here and I for
one am delighted that he did. Here’s a revival of a wonderful play, by
Philip King and directed by Eric Potts, told from a new perspective with
oodles of laugh-out loud hilarity. A scorcher! To 08-03-14 Jane Howard
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