Lloyd Evans
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Harry Hadden-Paton (Marlow) is quietly turning into one of the best light comedians we have. And that’s despite his good looks. Physical attractiveness tends to hamper a comic actor because he needs to dredge up something grotesque, silly or nightmarish to win the laughs. Hadden-Paton, against the odds, seems able to find it, and he produces a rare sort of alchemy: geeky and ridiculous but dashing and sexy, too.
A few niggles mar the production. When the prankster Tony Lumpkin pulls a fast one on Marlow, he signals his amusement by leering from a chair and stroking a stuffed rabbit. This hat-tip to Bond villains belongs in the rehearsal room, not in the final cut. Katherine Kelly, an excellent Kate Hardcastle, disguises herself as a serving girl to seduce Marlow and she deploys the lewd and explicit acrobatics of a lap dancer. Hoiking up her frilly dress, she bends double, wiggles her bum and exposes her milky white baps. Nice view, but far too coarse for the chaste coquetries the role requires. She’s a virgin imitating a barmaid, not a Russian crack-whore pretending to be the Duchess of Cambridge.
At each scene change the full cast, fizzing with self-approbation, come trundling forth to perform a song’n’dance routine. But they throw so much energy into these musical skits that the effect is exhausting. By trying to please themselves a little less they’ll succeeding in pleasing the audience a lot more.
At the Old Red Lion an intriguing new Australian comedy by Brendan Cowell. Happy New begins with two brothers, Danny and Lyle, lounging on sunbeds moisturising their faces and preparing to purge themselves of all impurities. Enter Danny’s beautiful girlfriend Pru, steaming with rage, having discovered his infidelity. She delivers one of the most scabrous and electrifying three-minute speeches I’ve ever heard on stage. But the effect is nil. Dramatically it drops dead because Danny, a brain-dead boor, refuses to acknowledge her accusations. He just sits there burnishing his lustrous pelt and adoring his delicate cheekbones. Off flounces Pru, even more furious.
She returns later, panting and dishevelled, and fires off another amazing speech describing her hasty fling with a spare businessman in a penthouse flat. Again Danny does nothing. Which is even more maddening. It completely flattens the drama. After this, everything becomes completely bonkers as the younger brother, Lyle, turns into a chicken. Strutting about and making cock-a-doodle-doo noises, he knocks Pru out cold with a cricket bat. It transpires that the brothers were raised in a chicken coop by their abusive parents and they believe themselves to be the offspring of wildfowl. We then cut to their early life in the hen run. After a lot more clucking and shouting the play dies of sheer incoherence.
What is it? An absurdist spoof, a dystopian documentary or a realistic sexual revenge drama? It wants to be all three. But the only real achievement of this production is to underuse its best asset, the sensationally charismatic Josie Taylor. Brendan Cowell is a gifted rhetorician but a bungler when it comes to dramatic architecture. He’s still worth watching, even though he has much to learn. Here’s one lesson: making poultry a pivotal theme is an invitation to lesser critics than this one to make wisecracks about turkeys.
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