REVIEW: Harlequinade
Harlequinade
Burton Taylor early, 23 May - 27 May
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet gets a revamp à la Trinny and Susannah in this little known Terence Rattigan farce, swapping its dreary cloak of sighs and solipsistic lyricism for the technicoloured dreamcoat of the Comedia dell’ Arte. The play takes the form of a disastrous dress rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet, in which every worst case scenario known to theatre veterans comes into action. It is the kind of thing you can eat up with a spoon.
Jules and Romeo are married in real life, and the irony of the contrast between their marital bickering and the fiery speeches of their parts is not lost on the audience. Although both Selby (Jessica Hammett) and Gosport (David Cochrane) are well aware that they are too long in the tooth to play Shakespeare’s youthful lovers, they little expect that they are about to be tripped up by their dentures.
“A Romeo at seventeen,” Gosport pays for his amorous youth not with death, but with the arrival of a long lost daughter and her child, the result of a fling with his landlady’s daughter Flossie. The fine line between the real and the imaginary so common to the play-within-a-play template is blurred as Gosport is transported by the self-important petulance of the prima donna.
Screw Romeo and his lyrical outbursts, the real tragedy of his life is that he never divorced that first wife of his. True to the dictum that an actor must never be in love with anyone but himself, Cochrane’s Arthur is deliciously egotistical, while his Romeo has all the fluffiness and fluster of an inanimate puppet trying to do passion. Hammett’s Juliet is as flat as a despondent washerwoman, but shows her true colours as Edna while flashing her sarcastic wit about the stage like a dagger.
Aunty Maud could have done with a little more geriatric deliberation, but all in all the large cast have an extremely lively interplay, hopping around the stage as agile as mountain goats, and do full justice to Rattigan’s tight and thoroughly enjoyable farce.
18th May 2006