Writer: Duncan Abel
Director: Abigail Pickard Price
Writer/director Tim Sullivan’s 1995 romantic comedy film Jack & Sarah starred Richard E. Grant as Jack, a newly widowed single father who hires an unconventional nanny to help care for his baby daughter, named Sarah after the mother who died in childbirth.
With a starry cast including Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and Eileen Atkins, the film filled the gap left in the wake of the previous year’s Four Weddings and a Funeral. But in the 30 years since, its impact has not lasted nearly as well as Richard Curtis’s films have.
It may be an odd choice, then, for a theatre adaptation. But unlike many other recent transfers of film properties onto the stage, there’s less of the sense that it is a cynical cash grab, and more that there are the bones of a story worth telling.
Duncan Abel adapts the original screenplay into a comedy that largely stays within the confines of Jack’s living room, which starts out as a construction site and gradually transforms into a tastefully redecorated London living space. George Banks takes on the mantle of Jack, creating a character who is able to flit between almost farcical levels of comedy and deep levels of grief.
And that is one aspect of the play that continually impresses. The loss of baby Sarah’s mother is more than just the play’s inciting incident; it is woven through the piece with care. In particular, it drives the relationship between Jack and his emotionally distant therapist father (Neil Roberts). But it also fuels a descent into drink, enabled and accompanied by Rufus Hound’s tramp, William.
Hound’s role is very much a supporting one, but he is an enlivening presence. William becomes one of those characters whose absence is felt just as strongly as their presence.
Among such large presences, Anya de Villiers’s Amy, a food delivery driver who ends up accepting the job as nanny, could feel a little underpowered. Instead, we get a charming performance, enriched by some sweet vocal performances when it emerges that Amy is also an aspiring singer-songwriter. The songs (written by de Villiers and Abel) never threaten to turn the show into a musical, but help to flesh out Amy’s character nonetheless.
There are times when the play’s structure feels hampered somewhat by its need to stick to the screenplay’s beats. At one point in Act II, Amy grumbles that her nannying role is constantly interrupted by both William and Jack’s mother-in-law, Phil (Sarah Moyle, in a role composed from the characters played by Dench and Atkins in the film). Such a line would carry more weight if it reflected the preceding events onstage, from which both characters are decidedly absent.
There is also a retention of some decidedly 1990s attitudes toward workplace relationships, as Jack navigates advances from his female boss while everyone assumes he will find love with his employee, Amy. While the play is brought up to date with mobile usage and the like, the roots of the piece as a 30-year-old screenplay occasionally make their presence felt.
Those quibbles aside, Jack and Sarah retains its sense of charming, emotional comedy throughout. The decision to adapt a screenplay for its merits, and not as a money-grabbing crowdpleaser to appeal to non-theatregoers, makes for a pleasant change. It is one that pays off.
Runs until 14 June 2026
