FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN WITH WODEHOUSE
Love On The Links (Salisbury Playhouse) Verdict: Easily par for the course ★★★★✩
SALISBURY, Wilts, has not had much luck this year, but things are looking up with a cheerfully dotty evening of P.G. Wodehousian golf comedy at the city’s Playhouse.
Love On The Links adapts some of the golfing yarns of comic novelist Wodehouse and delivers them with inventive multi-tasking by a cast of seven.
Oddly, the show does not use Wodehouse’s line about three of the world’s worst menaces being ‘slugs, poets and caddies with hiccups’.
The focus is more on wry dramatisation than the brilliance of Wodehouse’s language and similes.
The whole thing is set in the 19th hole of a Surrey golf club where the bibulous Oldest Member (Michael Fenton Stevens) is trying to talk a younger man (Adam Jackson-Smith) through some romantic troubles. Other members arrive and they are soon dragooned into enacting stories of marital mishaps.
The theme, if you want one, is that true love, particularly if it involves a shared enthusiasm for golf, will overcome most mishaps. Wodehouse’s fiction long defied satisfactory theatrical adaptation.
That changed in the West End five years ago when one of the Jeeves stories was staged with Stephen Mangan, Matthew Macfadyen and Mark Hadfield.
Ryan McBryde’s production here takes the same play-within-a-play approach and benefits greatly from the comic talents of Jenna Boyd, Rob Witcomb and the rest of the cast.
Miss Boyd is a marvel, making full artistic use of her curves and jowls. Tim Frances provides further laughs as a mulish club barman/pianist.
An evening to delight the Pringle knits and plus-two’s brigade. Golf, love and Wodehouse are done proud.