The Guvnor’s back with a bawdy romp
Jack Absolute Flies Again (Olivier, National Theatre, London)
Verdict: Malaprops and mayhem ★★★★★
RICHARD BEAN is back at the National Theatre with a snortingly good, crowdpleasing comedy to rival his One Man, Two Guvnors, which launched James Corden as a global phenomenon.
By coincidence, Corden and son were sitting right in front of me this week and revelled as much as I did in the gloriously nostalgic and daringly irreverent knock-about farce co-written with the actor Oliver Chris (who played the dim toff in the original One Man...) and based on Sheridan’s 18th-century classic The Rivals.
Instead of Regency Bath, however, the action takes place at an RAF base in West Sussex during the Battle of Britain, with our plucky pipe-sucking hero Jack (Laurie Davidson) in hot pursuit of posh girl Lydia Languish (Natalie Simpson) from the resident Women’s Auxiliary Airforce.
Although once ‘ sweet’ on each other, she has since discovered Women’s Lib, and is now sweet on someone else: the base’s axlegreased Yorkshire mechanic Dudley (Kelvin Fletcher).
The real star, though, is perhaps Caroline Quentin as voluptuous dowager Mrs Malaprop who owns the ‘country piles’ which has been requisitioned as an airfield. Delivering her solecisms with pride and fortitude, she declares herself ‘overcome with emulsion’ and laments that since her husband died she has ‘become a window’.
BuTperhaps her finest moment comes when she revives her character’s music hall pre-history, singing with a soprano warble while accompanying herself on ukulele.
Also happily for her, Peter Forbes is on hand as the rubicund, military throwback father of Jack who is besotted by her comely form on the grounds he finds lamb too juicy and prefers his meat aged.
Bean and Chris’s dialogue is a joyous blizzard of bawdy Carry-On innuendo, rolled out at such a torrential rate that it’s borderline genius or gibberish — but either way splendidly sends up political correctness and verbal prudery in general. Crucially, the action is sustained by a warmth and generosity of spirit that allows the two writers to pull off a surprisingly emotional finale.
Young director Emily Burns is clearly a name to watch and her production rejoices in stock comic characters updated from the 1770s to the 1940s. Corden roared at the dexterous slapstick, but the whole house was united in delight at the company’s ballroom jitterbug as well as a Loony Toons boxing match between Jack and his love rivals.
Those rivals include seamy Aussie Bob (James Corrigan) who mistakes ‘meditation’ for a form of carnal self-indulgence; and Sikh Tony (Akshay Sharan), who is a lofty, Oxford-educated would-be poet. But there’s also a gorgeous sub-plot involving mousey Roy (Jordan Metcalfe) who is nervously besotted with — and betrothed to — his posh cousin Julia (Helena Wilson), whose aristocratic family have left Scotland ‘because of the food’.
My only niggle was the needless air-battle footage projected at the end of each half. But Mark Thompson’s set is a comicbook delight, featuring a huge David Hockney-ish vista of the Sussex Downs. It perfectly distils the comic tone and is a rare blast of sunshine at the National.