This year has seen a raft of genteel and whimsical garden shows. There is something, it seems, about the Oxford college garden that makes directors cast their eyes backward with nostalgic longing to an era of upper-class refinement and poise. Pygmalion, The Government Inspector – and now Charley’s Aunt – have all indulged a predilection for the 19th Century comedy of manners.
The play follows two Oxford undergraduates, Jack Chesney and Charley Wykeham, as they attempt to win the hearts of their paramours and the favour of Charley’s wealthy aunt. The original production was a record-breaking hit with 1,466 performances in the West End and the play contains all the popular elements of a Victorian farce. But what’s congenial to Victorian audiences won’t always be so well received today – in fact, much of the comedy is too rooted in its time to be amusing. A joke about keeping the change from a farthing falls flat on its face.
I’d like to say that the acting in Charley’s Aunt is overdone as part of the aesthetic of a farce but I think that might be wishful thinking. Every farce contains its caricatures and when they work in this production they work very well – Joshua Harris-Kirkwood as Sir Francis Chesney is delightful as the stereotype of an Oxford ‘old boy’ and Benedict Nicholson does an amusing turn as the peevish guardian of the girls our protagonists must woe. But the play lacks the spontaneity and energy of the genre, the sense that these characters upon this stage could be led by the plot any which way – and I don’t think this a quality inherent in the script. Often, the play feels laboured where it should feel light, and this feels solely down to the over rehearsed quality of the dialogue.
There are some fine redeeming features however. Cross-dressing is integral to the play and Peter Swann’s performance as a man failing to imitate a woman is genuinely hilarious. Charles O’Halloran should also be commended for the earnest sweetness he brings to the role. Whilst it takes a while for the play to warm-up, once the stages start to fill with characters there is a greater sense of fun and the actors actually start to seem like their enjoying themselves, rather than plodding through the script. Comparisons have been made to Wilde but there is little of the delight in wordplay or paradox that you might see in a Wildean comedy. Instead the play gets its humour from the sheer absurdity of its situations and there is certainly enough of that to amuse the audience for an evening or more.
3 STARS
