Barefoot in the Park, Richmond Theatre, May 2012

This Neil Simon comedy was co-directed by Maureen Lipman who also played the part of the mother, Mrs Banks. As in all comedies, timing is of the essence, and Lipman was superb, as was Oliver Cotton as Victor Velasco, the engagingly impecunious Hungarian neighbour of her newlywed daughter Corrie.

The newlyweds at home

Corrie schemes to get her mother out to dinner with Velasco, along with herself and her husband, and the resulting four inebriated people somehow manage to make it through to a new day. Dominic Tighe was wonderfully natural as the young lawyer husband who eventually walks barefoot in the park, causing Faye Castelow as his wife to feel sudden sympathy for him and vow to make the marriage work. But it’s her mother who sets her up to be reasonable, and the comic character of Mrs Banks has a serious purpose to play.

Excellent designs by Tim Goodchild, appropriately nineteen sixties, were well lit by Nick Richings, and the brief but beautifully appropriate musical interludes during scene changes were the work of Matthew Bugg. This was Neil Simon’s first big Broadway hit, and the theme of two newlyweds coming to grief as they set up in their own flat after a week’s honeymoon is timeless.

Oliver Cotton and Maureen Lipman

The drunken scene, with Maureen Lipman sliding her heels uselessly on the carpet as she tries to stand up, was beautifully done. After sleeping it off she recovers her effervescent charm and can finally give her daughter a bit of very sound advice, “Give up a little of yourself for him . . . Take care of him. Make him feel important. Then you’ll have a wonderful marriage, like two out of every ten couples”. Well said, well played and well directed.

Performances at Richmond continue until May 5 — for details click here — and on May 7 it moves to the Arts Theatre, Cambridge.

After the Dance, National Theatre, NT Lyttelton, June 2010

“I love you, now change” is not a line in this play, but the young Helen lives this cliché, and at first seems to make it believable. Within a month she’s fallen in love with David Scott-Fowler and manages to get him to stop the drinking that’s destroying his liver. Her determined superficiality shatters her fiancé Peter Scott-Fowler, upends David’s 12 year marriage, and destroys his wife Joan. While these people wear the masks of gaiety and jest, and seem almost to have become their masks, reality persists beneath the surface, and the only person to fully comprehend it is John Reid, who lives with David and Joan in their spacious London flat as a self-confessed court jester, with a strong penchant for the drinks tray.

David with Helen

In the end it is John who tells David the truth about himself that kills the incipient marriage to Helen, and returns him to his former life, now as a widower. In the meantime we are treated to superb acting. Adrian Scarborough is brilliant as John, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll are entirely convincing as the ever cool David and his wife Joan, who loves him but gaily pretends to be just as cool, so as not to bore him. Faye Castelow portrays Helen as a bossy little ingénue, and John Hefferman is a rather edgy Peter, who tries to take life seriously, but doesn’t quite succeed.

David playing Avalon for Joan

What I loved about this fine production by Thea Sharrock, apart from the spacious and elegant designs by Hildegard Bechtler, was the music. Certainly the play features the 1920s foxtrot ‘Avalon’ towards the end of each act, but the melody was pinched from Puccini, albeit in a disguised form, and in this production we also hear the original. For those who know it, this is powerfully suggestive because it’s the music behind E lucevan le stelle from the opera Tosca. Cavaradossi sings it before he dies, knowing that these are his last moments, and it was played here just before Joan goes out to the balcony on her own, never to return, and again at the end when David decides to return to the drinking that will destroy him.

This riveting play by Terence Rattigan had the misfortune to open in June 1939, shortly before war was declared, and when the country’s mood rapidly changed it was taken off. So it failed to enjoy a good run, and Rattigan left it out of the collected plays he published in 1953. It’s been somewhat ignored for that reason, but this production and cast do it full justice, and I recommend booking tickets before word gets out.

Performances continue until August 11^th — for details click here.