What is it with farce timing in London? Over and over again I see things where you can feel the script sort of fighting the production--funny lines go by without a pause or anyone acknowledging them; unfunny things get pauses. I wonder if I'm maybe just too sitcom-y in my tastes for comedy. And yet, oh, when this production gets going later on, it is powerfully funny. It just takes a while to get there. Honestly the accents in the first scene sounded off; either they got better, or I grew into them.
This was better as a physical production--striking and lovely--than overall as an acted comedy. One of the main female characters, a columnist, was more reliably funny for their costumes than for anything she said. This is a fine and intricate script, and those intricacies often got missed; I would have traded two or three of the scenes that whizz by across the stage for a tad more rehearsal among the actors. I was roaring with laughter towards the end, but for the first 1/3 everything felt a bit off. I'm probably over-sensitive about American accents, but there was more too it than that: as with middling Shakespeare, neither actors nor production really attacked the script.
This play was an influence over the Cohen Brothers, and here the influence of the Cohens sort of comes back at the play. Only the chilliness they manage in their films doesn't really work on stage: the off rhythms of dialogue in their movies are deliberately off, while here the production just didn't really grasp them. Again as with Shakespeare, there is just a basic debt to language that needed to be paid before anything else could happen; I roared in parts, but was disappointed at least half the time.
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