Today,
I’m staying home for the teachers I used to work with.
National
Theatre Live is releasing one of their plays on YouTube every week during the
pandemic, with a different play uploaded every Thursday to watch for free. Be
warned, between my availability to watch these, review them, and post those
reviews, I’ll be behind the curve, posting about plays that have already come
and gone from YouTube. Case in point, this was the first play National Theatre
Live put up, and they’re now on their third. A midcentury-set Brighton farce, I
was aware of this show mainly for James Corden having starred in it (I
remembered when it transferred to Broadway back in the day, and at the Tonys,
he performed the scene where he gets into a “fight” with himself, at one point
smashing himself on the head with a trashcan lid.) I’ll admit, I expected to
like it more than I ultimately did, but the play does have some deniably great
parts (premise spoilers.)
Dolly
and Alan’s cozy engagement party is interrupted by an unexpected guest: Roscoe,
Dolly’s ex-fiancee who everyone thought was dead. Dolly never wanted to marry
Roscoe, who’s both a gangster and openly gay, but she was promised to him by
her father in a business arrangement, and Roscoe intends to hold up his end of
the bargain. Things aren’t what they seem, however. What’s Roscoe really doing
in town, and is there any hope for the young lovers? All the while, Roscoe’s
hired man Francis gets more than he bargains for when he acquires a second
employer for himself and tries to keep both happy without either finding out
he’s pulling double duty.
We’ll
start with the play itself, which feels fairly middle-of-the-road to me. It’s a
lot of standard farce stuff – conveniently-intricate misunderstandings,
disguises, people popping up at exactly the wrong moments, and way more running
around to avoid certain discoveries than feels strictly necessary. That’s the
name of the game with that kind of story, and I don’t really fault it for any
of that. It’s what every farce of made of. However, it’s not so much the
building blocks themselves as it is what you do with them, and One Man, Two Guv’nors doesn’t have a
particularly-inspired execution. There are fun sequences here and there (the
dinner-serving fiasco at the end of Act I is obviously the largest comic
setpiece in the production, and I like Francis’s attempts to turn things around
for himself toward the end,) but it’s not enough to sustain the 2-hour-and-40-minute runtime. That’s an
ambitious length for any play, let alone a somewhat-flimsy comedy.
There’s
a surprising amount of audience interaction, mostly Francis enlisting audience
members to come up onstage and help him out in his “trying to please his two
guv’nors” schemes. The laughs here are mostly cheap, but they admittedly work.
I think James Corden’s Francis is at his most effective in these scenes, quick
and funny and affable as he riffs off of the slightly baffled/embarrassed
audience members he’s wrangled into helping him. Elsewhere, he, and most of the
cast, are more loud and emphatic than they are anything else, which does little
to elevate the so-so material. (Side note: I usually catch at least a few
familiar faces in National Theatre Live productions, and aside from Corden,
this recording also features Jemima Rooper, who I remember from Lost in Austen, and Trevor Laird, who
played Martha’s dad for a hot second on Doctor
Who.)
The
notable exception for me in all these proceedings is the character of Stanley,
played by Oliver Chris. The second of Francis’s two guv’nors, Stanley is
ultra-posh, none too bright, and very full of himself. Like everyone in the
show, his characterization is thin and it’s a type you’ve seen a thousand times
before, but he’s also hilarious.
Again, it goes to show, it’s not just the what, it’s the how. I can’t tell whether Stanley has better lines than everyone
else or if Chris just delivers them better – I suspect the answer is “both,”
although I’m not sure what the proportions are. All I know is that he was the
only part of the play that consistently made me laugh whenever he was onstage.
I realized how fun he was going to be in his first scene, when he’s asking
about accommodations and notes that, given his boarding-school background, he’s
happy as long as he has “a bed, a chair, and no one pissing on [his] face.”
Warnings
Sexual
references, some old-school off-color jokes (sexism, homophobia, etc.,)
language, violence, and drinking/smoking.
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