Writer: Michael Cooney
Director: Ron Aldridge
The surname Cooney is synonymous with the English farce, a particular subset of stage comedy that relies almost as much on the number of doors a set has as on the number of actors.
Ray Cooney’s West End farces are built on strange coincidences, verbal misunderstandings, and a series of escalating stakes that always threaten to explode in the faces of their protagonists, typically men who have subverted societal norms and are attempting to hide it. Whether that’s the bigamist taxi driver in Run For Your Wife or the philandering doctor at the heart of It Runs in the Family, revived at the Mill at Sonning at this spot in their programme last year, the fact that such farces often follow a prescribed pattern of events can often be overlooked due to the cleverness of the construction.
Cash on Delivery is not a Ray Cooney farce, but a 1990s effort by his son, Michael. Here, the familiar components are all present. The central character, Eric Swan, is a suburban homeowner who has been too embarrassed to tell his wife he had lost his job, so he has been claiming social security benefits for a variety of lodgers and their families. When an anti-fraud inspector turns up to assess the claims, Eric’s attempts to evade being found out construct the spine of the lot. Oh, and there are many doors.
Director Ron Aldridge, who also took on It Runs in the Family last year, calls upon several of the Mill’s stalwart comedy regulars. Steven Pinder as Swan, and James Bradshaw as his lodger, Norman – a real lodger in this case, albeit one Swan has told social services has just died – lead a cast who know absolutely what pace and tempo the jokes need to wring the largest amount of laughs.
Unfortunately, there is less humour to be wrung from Cooney Junior’s script, which frequently feels like it is aping the plot and pace of his father’s works without really understanding the care with which they were constructed. There’s an understandably dated nature to the whole exercise, too. While the topic of benefit fraud has decades of history in newspaper headlines, and the irony of one of its biggest participants being an otherwise respectable-looking middle-class man rather than the bogeymen depicted in the tabloids would have been fun in the 1990s, here it feels like a relic of another age.
Pinder and Bradshaw always feel as if they know that their undoubted skills outclass the material. Certainly, the characters always give the impression that their movements around the house are driven less by character and more by the diktat of the template Cooney is working to. That same sense of disconnection applies to pretty much all the characters, from Harry Gostelow’s inspector to Michael Shaw’s gormless Uncle George, the only member of the family to be in on Swan’s money-making schemes.
Many of Cooney Senior’s scripts included characters who were either a bit fey or who ramped up the campness in an affectation of homosexuality, where the insinuation that the character might be gay is part of a rather tired joke. Thankfully, there is no such twist here; but instead, there is a subplot about cross-dressing, as a box of illicitly obtained hospital wares is mistaken for women’s clothing and an insinuation that Eric has a predilection for transvestitism. That might almost be worse, were it not for it being so crassly, almost lazily written that there is little substance about which to take offence. That the strongest part of that whole sorry subplot is an accusation of cross-dressing being met with “Cross? I’m absolutely furious,” speaks volumes.
As characters disappear into the ground floor bedroom for little reason than to be removed from the increasingly frantic on stage action, as Shaw clumsily positions himself next to the only inwards-opening door so that it can be slammed in his face seconds later, and as the fraud inspector becomes obsessed with the Shaws’ offstage washing machine for no discoverable reason, the sense that this is the weakest of a long line of The Mill’s previously strong run of spring farces increases. Cash on Delivery may provoke laughs from an audience fondly recalling the heyday of the Whitehall farce, but in terms of delivering on its own merits, it’s dead on arrival.
Runs until 4 April 2026
