Ken Bentley

Review

One of Ben Travers’s 1920s farces, ‘Thark’ has a thinner plot than the average farce audience member’s hairline. While his wife’s away, fruity philanderer Sir Hector Benbow arranges to take a lady out to dinner. At the same time, the crude, nouveau riche Mrs Frush arrives for a meeting about a mansion, sold to her by Sir Benbow, which she’s now convinced is haunted. When Lady Benbow returns home unexpectedly and finds her house ‘stiff with ladies’, her husband enlists the help of his nephew Ronald Gamble and long-suffering butler, Hook, to pull the wool over her eyes. When the cast decamps to the haunted house for the second act, plot tangles are abandoned in favour of giving the sound and lighting engineers a thorough workout.

With a nice mix of pleasurably predictable gags and surreal comic flourishes that prompt fits of giggles from an audience caught unawares, Crispin Harris’s production involves a young cast who nail their characters’ vocal and facial tics from the off. The slapstick stunts are sharp, attention is wittily diverted from a set change by the cast dancing a cross between the Charleston and the Monster Mash and (a real rarity, this) the doors of the budget set actually stand up to the repetitive slamming. Paul Lincoln is particularly good as the highly strung nephew. I’ve certainly never seen a farce produced with this unusual combination of youthful charm and attention to detail.

Bella Todd
Time Out (Critics’ Choice)
★★★★★★