Slapstick fun at the wedding from hell
MeN of britain, do NOt take your prospective mother-in-law to Chris Chibnall’s lively comedy Worst Wedding ever. the show portrays an overpowering mother-of-the-bride determined her daughter should have the wedding she cannot afford. Ouch, it’s true.
a band, a marquee, sit-down lunch, speeches, an enormous dress, official photographer, wedding list at John Lewis: all these and more are deemed essential if beady-eyed, 60-something Liz (Julia Hills) is to maintain her status in suburban society.
We are not told where she and her lumbering husband Mel live, but from their accents it may be bristol. Selfemployed Mel (Derek Frood) is soft about his two vicious ridgeback dogs.
Mel and Liz are not rich. but they call in favours. they borrow. Improvise. Does it matter if the portable loos are a bit unsteady and their doors get stuck? er, it does. a resulting slapstick scene is killingly funny.
Chibnall rightly identifies the mad extravagance of so many modern weddings (even though the youngsters might prefer something plainer). He also mines the eternal truth of the aspirational mother in weddingorganisation mode. I bet it was as true in ancient Rome as now.
Liz is a wonderful portrait of pride, despair, brittleness and social oneupmanship. Like any mother-in-law, she is determined not to be beaten, even when all about her is collapsing and the dogs have just savaged the vicar (a slightly miscast Kieran Hill). ‘We keep going! It’s a wedding!’ cries Liz, moments after the groom (Nav Sidhu) has punched one of the guests.
ELISabetH Hopper, West Country accent a half-notch too high, plays Rachel the bride. elizabeth Cadwallader does a great turn as her vampish older sister. there is even an onstage wedding band which keeps making surreal entrances.
the play is not perfect. Its final scene could be cut, the pace is iffy in the first half-hour and some of the denouement is far-fetched. but there are terrific lines — ‘We’re family and no one comes out of a family unscathed’ — and the whole thing has a pleasing, neo-ayckbournian glaze, very english, mixing the sentimental and the salty. Undemanding fun.
after Salisbury, the show will travel to New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich (March 1-11); and the Queen’s theatre, Hornchurch (March 15-april 1).
tWeNtY five years ago, bbC tV had quite an amusing sitcom called Waiting For God which featured a game old bird with a mind of her own.
Sandi toksvig’s new play, billed a comedy, aims towards similar territory, being set in an old people’s home in (ho ho) Vampish: Elizabeth Cadwallader as the older sister in Worst Wedding Ever Gravesend. the town is flooding. the home is about to be destroyed by a raging torrent — of water, not of mirthless toksvigian dialogue, though that cannot be discounted.
Not everyone has left the building. Six women, five of them inmates of the home (the other is a young black woman sent to save them), are stuck. What will happen to them?
For two hours and more we follow this implausible set-up. What happens is tiresome, hackneyed and lame, but I suppose it at least bears Miss toksvig’s sardonic trademark.
there is a suicidal Cockney, a racist and kleptomaniac Christian, a droll lesbian (the goodie), a retired actress and a mysterious soul with dementia who is interested in biscuits and sex toys.
THe youngster (who speaks yoof patois) proclaims her hatred for old people. the only man to appear is a thief. He is played by one theo toksvig-Stewart, making his professional debut. ah, how lucky we are to live in a meritocracy.
through no fault of its cast, which includes Maggie McCarthy, Joanna Monro and Sheila Reid, this is surely going to be one of the more embarrassing comedies of the year.
a few people in the opening-night audience laughed determinedly; but from the rest of the clientele there came the sound of knuckles being chewed.
the humour rests largely on comical contrast, having old-age pensioners cracking references to things such as ant and Dec, One Direction and Peter andre.
‘I can fart the Marseillaise,’ says one of the ladies. and: ‘You’re at the doctor more often than I manage to open my bowels.’
How perplexing to think that Miss toksvig is, in some quarters, considered quite the modern Noel Coward.