One Man, Two Guv’nors (2011)

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.