Napoleon makes a comeback

10 April 2012

Here's a real theatrical discovery or rather recovery. John Whiting's romantic farce with serious undertones, which portrays an upper-crust English family gripped by war-fever and dreams of heroism one fine summer day in 1804, has mouldered in unfair theatrical oblivion for decades. A revised version, 11 years after its 1951 premiere, sank with few traces. And this Oxford Stage Company's production by Paul Miller lacks the high personality comic actors who could command the play's high farcical summits. But there's no missing the exuberant comic invention and satirical glee by which A Penny for a Song is propelled. The scene when English volunteer soldiers are excitedly taken for Napoleon's troops landing on shore marks a high-water point in modern English comedy.

With what seductive wiliness Whiting must have diverted 1951's old-fashioned audiences. How quaint, how comfortable the scene must have looked. For Whiting's play is set in a plush Dorset garden and distant orchard. The facade of a house allows glimpses of a grand interior - not that Tom Piper's plain, cut-price design allows any opulence. An old servant positioned high up in a very stageylooking tree, telescope in hand, is poised to sound the alarm if Napoleon's anticipated invasion disturbs the country calm. "A fine morning for a battle," exults Charles Kay's rather caricatured Sir Timothy Lamprett.

The middle-aged Timothy and his brother Lamprett, who both take eccentricity to the limits where lunacy begins, Lamprett's distracted wife, Hester, the mildly camp top-hatted Mr Matthews, (Julian Glover) with cloak, Tory convictions and young servant in tow, are all casually odd in the comic way the high and moneyed can afford to be. But into this midst there comes Richard Lynch's Hallam Matthews, an angry young mercenary who arrives fresh from the ghastly warfields of Europe with a child rescued from catastrophe. To the jaunty jingoism all about him, to the notion that war is just a big adventure for the well-born to organise, Hallam brings a scornful antidote and the radical snarl of Tom Paine's Rights of Man.

It is in sight of Hallam's hatred of war that the gorgeously absurd, pomped-up Sir Timothy hatches his preposterous masterplan to defeat Napoleon singlehanded, depending on no more than self-disguise, a French phrase book, a well, tunnel and his own mania. Whiting's satire at the expense of hare-brained generals, rampant jingoists and the wild 1804 schemes to defeat Napoleon is managed with lethal good-humour: Jeremy Clyde's Lamprett, obsessively tends his fire-engine, a piece of equipment to which he has given his life and his passion. And his spouse, Gabrielle Drake's delightfully vague Hester, sets out to command an Amazons' corps.

Real life, in the shape of a reserve army on manoeuvres under Brian Protheroe's equally lunatic, military-dreamer throws ill-made plans into a fine chaos, complete with a balloon and much glorious baloney until love of cricket puts an end to foul play. But Miller's production is too heavy handed. Charles Kay's Timothy, by parading and heavily emphasising his lunacy, reduces its comic impact. Jeremy Clyde and Protheroe's barking commandant are similarly excessive. Julian Glover's Wildean Matthews expunges all nuances of suave campery and substitutes a charmless gravity. But Richard Lynch's Edward, who keeps his furies in check, and Jody Watson, as Lamprett's sexy daughter who falls unrequitedly for the mercenary, sound the serious notes of this exquisite comedy.

A Penny For A Song

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