Habeas Corpus review: Alan Bennett revival feels outdated

In farce, timing is everything, and the timing of this production is off
Dan Starkey and Kirsty Besterman in Habeas Corpus at the Menier Chocolate Factory
Manuel Harlan
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis14 December 2021

Fans of Alan Bennett’s bittersweet, delicate later works may be bemused by this 1974 farce, where the jokes and the clever-dickery are ramped up to eleven.

The writer deploys stereotypes – doctor, ingenue, vicar, battleaxe – in a standard sex-comedy plot but has them speak in arch asides to the audience about the yearning and the fear of mortality that fuel their desperate fumblings.

It takes place on an almost-bare set, parts are in verse, and the cleaning lady functions as a Greek chorus. The title is a clever joke about an arcane Latin legal reference meaning “you may have the body”. Oh, and a pair of huge fake breasts are – how shall I put this? – prominent.

Though many witty lines raise a titter, including serendipitous references to booster injections and vaccine certificates, it’s undeniably dated. Patrick Marber’s revival is handsomely cast and mounted, but it’s under-rehearsed and fails to hit the necessary pitch of earnest hysteria.

The logic of staging a play about yearned-for intimacy and looming death right now seems misplaced: making jokes about sexual molestation even more so. I’m not saying any subject should be beyond comedy. But in farce, timing is everything, and the timing of this production is off.

The play is rooted in an England where mockery of the aristocracy, the church or the medical profession was no longer truly daring but still carried a frisson of naughtiness. Jasper Britton’s Arthur Wicksteed is a 53-year-old Hove GP muttering grumpily about his failing sexual power, empty marriage, and annoying patients.

He at least has some depth. His wife Muriel (Catherine Russell) is a sex-starved caricature and his ‘spinster’ sister (Kirsty Besterman) just wants a bigger bust – and blimey, that term alone dates the show. Arthur can’t even remember the name of his pathetic, hypochondriac son, and it’s hard to see why we should. The characters are fitted into a schematic plot where everyone ends up chasing everyone else around a symbolic coffin.

Jasper Britton and Abdul Salis
Manuel Harlan

Did I mention the vicar is called Canon Throbbing, the charwoman Mrs Swabb, and Katie Bernstein’s smirkingly nubile love interest is Felicity Rumpers? One character is mocked for shortness, another for obesity. Again, fair enough: Shakespeare does that sort of stuff too. Except, perhaps, the fake boobs.

But Marber’s actors just don’t muster the conviction to put this arch, knowing 1970s coarseness across. The original cast of Habeas Corpus was entirely white: and I’m not sure the cause of diversity is best served by casting black actors here as an object of mistaken, fetishised desire and a wannabe suicide.

I thought it was only ten years or so since I’d laughed uproariously at the last major revival of this play, by Sam Mendes at the Donmar, with Jim Broadbent and Imelda Staunton. Turns out it was in 1996, closer to the premiere than to now.

A lot of dialectic has flowed under the bridge since then. I was looking forward to seeing how Marber, a brilliant writer and director with proven form at the Menier, would make Habeas Corpus relevant for our times. Sadly, I don’t think he has.

Menier Chocolate Factory, until Feb 27; menierchocolatefactory.com

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