PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Ustinov, Bath (in rep to Thur 22 Dec)

THEATRE Joining Calderon's ‘The Phoenix of Madrid’ and Goethe's ‘Iphigenia’ in the Ustinov’s three-pronged autumn rep season comes Marivaux’s 18th-century comedy about two lovelorn aristocrats with a seemingly endless capacity for self-delusion. Living conveniently cheek-by-jowl in Paris, the Marquise and the Chevalier languish in their widowed/jilted miseries while their pragmatic, plain-speaking servants – Lisette and Lubin respectively – attempt to patch and match them up for their own ends.

Playing out over the course of a single – albeit rather hectic – afternoon, the action could easily descend into farce, and if Marivaux’s original is a little more obviously rooted in commedia dell’ arte, this new translation by Mike Alfreds (and the first ever English-language production of the play) aims at a less mannered and frenetic, more rounded approach: more Merchant-Ivory than ‘Carry On...’. This doesn’t always come off – there are times when you’re itching for either the Marquise or the Chevalier to explode into absurdity – but, as with this autumn’s other two Laurence Boswell-directed outings at the Ustinov, you can’t fault the production as a piece of theatre or the consummate all-round quality of the acting.

Laura Rees and Milo Twomey work off each other beautifully as the Marquise and Chevalier, goading each other towards and then over the border between friendship and love, while Frances McNamee and Peter Bramhill play their perfect servant foils with bluff, say-it-like-it-is vigour, bristling at and perplexed by their employers’ self-indulgent posturing. Elsewhere, there’s a touch of the Malkovichs about Christopher Hunter’s wistfully pedantic philosophe Hortensius, while, as the Count, Adam Jackson-Smith reprises the decent-but-slightly-doltish shtick he plays to a tee in ‘Phoenix of Madrid’.

All told, then, ‘Surprise’ is entertaining fare, but whether Marivaux’s rather slight aristocratic comedy deserves its billing as a ‘European classic’ is something of a moot point. Or maybe this autumn season really only represents Boswell clearing his throat, and in future we’ll see his undoubted directorial skills and top-grade casts deployed on work that’s not quite so similar to the fare on offer in the Theatre Royal itself. (Eric Blair)

Copyright Eric Blair 2011