★★★★★
Thark isn’t, you might think, the obvious first choice for a student play. A little-known farce written in the 1920s by Ben Travers, its script could appear outdated, even archaic. But then, I realised as we sat down in our seats in the Pilch Theatre and a two piece jazz band struck up behind us, this was no ordinary performance. Under the brilliant team of director Jack Bradfield, producer Claudia Graham and production manager Charles Pigeon, this old fashioned comedy has (rather appropriately for a haunted house mystery) taken on a life of its own and roared onto the Oxford theatre scene with a vitality and shout few other plays can muster.
The relentless nature of this play seems to resemble Wodehouse on acid. The audience’s laughter grows as the stage gradually becomes crowded with a host of characters with names like Sir Hector Benbow and Cherry Buck, who soon become irrevocably tangled up in endless misunderstandings. This is, of course, all accompanied all the innuendo and bad puns as you could possibly want. The first act is a frenzy of encounters and sparring dialogue full of quips and witticisms- with the subject of Thark, the haunted house, only appearing properly in the second half. The non-stop nature of this play, with characters constantly falling headlong into humorous and uncomfortable situations and even having to adopt different identities, is expertly dealt with in this production. Whilst being thrown into this maelstrom of a performance might potentially have been hard to follow, the cast work together to make sure they are only ever one step ahead of us- whilst giving the illusion that it could all collapse around their ears at any moment. The decision to set Thark in the round gives the dizzying impression that you’re sitting in some sort of Hadron Collider of events, whilst underneath the farcical nature of the play it is all tightly held together- there is very much order in the chaos here.
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The acting, too, is superb: the overblown pompousness of Adam Daiper as Sir Hector Benbow and the facial expressions of Seamus Lavan as the butler Hook, both draw the audience in and put them at ease. They fulfil that most difficult role in a farce- managing to be uproariously funny and believable at the same time. Together with the director they twist and play with Ben Travers’ script, keeping the audience forever on their toes. Where problems in the play could have arisen, such as the slightly worrying line “I don’t want a suspicious little wife for a wife”, they are offset masterfully with humour: here, Ronald Gamble, played by Barney Shekleton, has a tantrum and hides in the bed clutching a teddy bear. And as for Thark’s butler, Death, played by George Fforde- well, he seems to have stepped straight out of a Scooby Doo mystery, and has a nasty habit of appearing when you least expect him to. Amongst this utter madness, Amy Perkis and Niamh Simpson as Kitty Stratton and Lady Benbow subtly keep the play together- moving the plot along effortlessly and playing the ‘straight man’ to the other comics onstage, whilst still holding their individual, interesting personal depths.
This play is a hilarious romp through all that’s best of farcical theatre. The production’s attention to detail, such as putting props amongst the audience, means you feel intimately involved in the hilarious calamities unfolding onstage. The sheer joy and fun of it all is obvious. I agree with Michael Billington when he called Thark ‘sublimely irrelevant’- and what better praise could a farce get than that?
