Great cast ...just a pity this suit does not fit like a glove
The Man In The White Suit (Wyndham’s Theatre, London) Verdict: More pedigree than chemistry ★★★✩✩ Gaslight (Palace Theatre, Watford) Verdict: Electrifying melodrama ★★★★✩
ShoULD you ever wish to exhume an Ealing comedy for the stage, you might be tempted to assemble a team such as this.
A comic actor like stephen Mangan. A starlet of stage and strictly like Kara Tointon. And a highly-rated director such as sean Foley, who has previously staged Ealing comedies and who worked with Mangan on a hit production of Jeeves and Wooster in 2013.
You might also consider employing a designer such as Michael Taylor. his lavishly varied set here matches the 1951 film scene- for- scene in Lancashire locations down the pub, up the mill or on the open road.
And to paper over any cracks that may appear in the translation from screen to stage, why not commission some skiffle music from Charlie Fink of the band Noah & The Whale?
You would, i think, be fairly confident of having a hit on your hands. But impressive as this line-up is, i soon found myself wondering why i was liking their production more than loving it. Perhaps because the story is so last century.
Trying to perfect the formula for an indestructible fabric, boffin sidney (Mangan) is discovered repeatedly wrecking the lab of a Lancashire textile manufacturer (a magnificently brusque Richard Cordery).
only the boss’s fabulously stylish daughter (Tointon) understands sidney’s geekish mission and is prepared to help him. No one stages such capers better than Foley. he has our hero blowing up his lab coat, flying from the back of his beloved’s shiny red Daimler and removing a misplaced prawn from the crotch of Tointon’s fiance.
it’s high farce, with doors banging, scenery unfolding and an amusing chase at the end through the pop-up houses of a giant Lowrystyle landscape. Comedy, however, needs to move at the speed of thought, and with so much going on, even Fink’s toe-tapping rockabilly music struggles to hide sluggish segues.
Even so, Mangan’s bashful sidney is immaculately drilled as he shows us effortless timing, goofy teeth and disorderly hair. he’ll be fitter than a butcher’s dog by the end of the run, not least thanks to his dance medley with Tointon in her boudoir — a necessary nod to strictly.
As the mill owner’s daughter she is a likeable, but very bizarre, comic cross between Maggie Thatcher and Corrie’s late Vera Duckworth. No wonder sidney finds her terrifying.
sue Johnston is absolutely herself as sidney’s washerwoman landlady, but Rina Fatania as factory worker Brenda is the show’s most naturally funny flat-cap creation.
No one puts a foot wrong, yet sporadic laughter is more appreciative than festive. When a comedy has to work this hard, it’s often because it’s not working at all. Be warned: pedigree is no substitute for chemistry.
iN WATFoRD, new life has been breathed into Patrick hamilton’s ghoulish Victorian melodrama, written in 1938.
The play gave us the term ‘gaslighting’ with its story of a woman being driven mad by her manipulative husband. here it’s re-set in a modern women’s refuge where the play is acted out by the residents. it creates a new perspective on psychological abuse. The actress Jasmine Jones gives a manspreading demonstration of ‘ toxic masculinity’ as the original play’s anti- hero Jack, rendering him as a nasty, snarling Ulsterman in the body of an evil sparrow.
sally Tatum plays Jack’s wife with a mix of fearful defiance and desperate hysteria, before Tricia Kelly comes to the rescue as a thoroughly maternal inspector Rough.
it ain’t subtle, but Richard Beecham directs a sharply focused production in a crisiscentre fitted with Exit signs, health-and- safety notices and dimmer switches to simulate the eerie gaslight.
There’s a touch of sarcasm with Tammy Wynette’s stand By Your Man, and the rather too tidy ending could do with a modern twist. otherwise, a fusty old yarn has been given an electric shock.