HABEAS CORPUS
Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Friday 16th March, 2018
Alan Bennett’s curious farce from the early 1970s doesn’t feel like an Alan Bennett. The cosy, Northern bleakness of his bathos is not present in this early work, in which he strives to dazzle with his intelligence at the expense of character development. A farce needs a light touch to make its contrivances palatable; Bennett peppers his with dark observations about mortality amid all the libido-driven incidents and misunderstandings. The play sounds very much like a Joe Orton.
Vanessa Comer gives her production a decidedly seaside postcard appeal: bathing huts and bunting serve as the setting, and the performance style is very much end-of-the-pier revue. The cast adopt a larger-than-life style to suit the excesses of their characters – ciphers, by and large, with their individual lusts and longings driving their actions.
Niki Baldwin kicks things off as charwoman-cum-narrator-cum-host, Mrs Swabb, an impudent but charming presence – a working class character bemused by the goings-on of this middle-class mob. Pamela Hickson is pitch perfect as the frustrated Mrs Wicksteed, neglected by her husband, flitting between deadpan and melodramatic posturing. As her husband, Dr Wicksteed, Peter Ward can afford to be more exaggerated in his lechery, to increase the contrast between his professional and his personal demeanours. Kathy Buckingham is a hoot as lonely spinster Connie, proudly sporting her mail-order mammaries – the triggers for incidences of mistaken identity. After a bit of a flustered start, David Draper’s Sir Percy provides some funny moments with his trousers down. Abi Deehan is sweetly conniving as young Felicity, hoping to trap a man into marrying her and legitimise the child she is carrying, but for me, the most consistent and developed characterisation of the show comes from Nathan Brown as the Wicksteed’s weedy, spotty, hypochondriac son, Dennis – an Emo Phillips lookalike, the antithesis of the dashing young hero!
It’s familiar territory but Bennett heightens the theatricality; the cast need to sharpen the quickfire asides to the audience and I’m sure the first-night fluffs will disappear as the show’s run progresses, and the entrances and exits need sharpening to maintain a fast pace.
The plot winds up with a direct riff on The Importance of Being Earnest with Margot McCleary’s Lady Rumpers doing a Lady Bracknell and Dennis paraphrasing John Worthing regarding his adopted fatal illness.
And so Bennett, yet to find his own voice, gives us Orton and now Oscar Wilde – it makes sense. All three are gay men holding up to ridicule the social and sexual mores of heterosexuals, making the audience laugh at themselves. Society has moved on since the play’s first production – does the audience recognise itself on the stage? Probably not very much; these two-dimensional stereotypes are old hat.
All in all, this makes for an enjoyable production, with the energy of the cast just about covering the creaking of the plot.
Mrs Swabb (Niki Baldwin) introduces Dennis (Nathan Brown)
Bum on a Seat 