Oof.
Theatre’s a risky business. You can assemble the finest ingredients: hilarious actors; witty original songs; a play based on a famous comic novel set on the very Thames by which your theatre, Kingston’s Rose delightfully stands – and still produce a casserole of nonsense.
Jerome K Jerome’s gentle book about three Victorian chums who, tiring of the city, take a boat up river to Oxford, is not particularly juicy dramatic material. It’s a pottering, wittering, chuntering sort of comedy; peak excitement occurs when they try and fail to open a tin of pineapple. Director Christopher Haydon and writer Al Smith raise the stakes and reimagine the midlife mini-break as a stag-do-goes-wrong. The opening scene sets the tone of inexplicable frustration and bewilderment. The gents are, for reasons that are never clear, inside Hampton Court maze, where befuddled bridegroom Harris (Bronté Barbé) and melancholy widower George (Richard David-Caine) have agreed to meet their dodgy friend Jerome (Jonny Weldon). They get lost, argue with umbrellas, and fling fake apples into the audience. Jerome then strongarms them into a surprise week-long boat trip ahead of Harris’ nuptials in Oxford, in which multiple similar scenarios, increasingly unmoored from plausibility, will unravel, with decreasing comic returns.
You can’t sustain nearly three hours of theatre on patter, strolling songs and knob gags
A high energy farce in the Edwardian, end-of-the-pier style is not an insane direction to take, if you want to have the most fun with blazers and straw boaters and that pineapple tin. But Haydon, Smith and co go completely overboard and chuck all the lost arts of vaudeville at this gentle story: pratfalls, mimes, slapstick gags with disappearing apples and umbrellas; balls-in-face physical humiliation for the actors. There’s a farmyard of props: a dog puppet which adeptly licks its own balls, swans, and a life-sized foam pig which is butchered on board. I got especially tired of the double entendre, which seems to have a single obsession: no vaguely phallic lever is left untugged and a boat offers the gents far too many opportunities to play with their rods, tackle or members.
It’s fun at first, but you can’t sustain nearly three hours of theatre on patter, strolling songs and knob gags. There's not much development and the introduction of deeper emotional content briefly and late on is jarring. It's a shame, because there are lots of bright ideas on the stage and the actors are very good, especially David-Caine, who has a lanky charismatic physicality reminiscent of John Cleese, and deserves stronger material. The songs are a highlight thanks to composer and MD Grant Olding, who did the music for One Man Two Guvnors. A lurid scene where the trio are attacked by swans and fight back, descending into bacchic frenzy, shows the potential. Humour is subjective and, on the night I went, some people were laughing. But for farce to really work you have to believe in the desperation of the characters and the intolerable pressure of their situation. Essentially, this is just three middle-class middle-aged gents camping near Reading and Marlowe, in easy reach of the pub. I found this hectic vaudevillian take on Three Men in a Boat farcical for all the wrong reasons.
