Writers: Joshua King, Simon Paris and Say It Again, Sorry?
Director: Simon Paris
As the play starts we find ourselves in a drawing room, with what seems to be a perfectly traditional production of the Oscar Wilde classic. Things very soon begin to fall apart, though, as within a moment or two we arrive at the point when Jack is due to enter and it becomes apparent that one of the lead actors has failed to arrive at the theatre. At this point, the play could go anywhere, but the choice made by the writers here is to find an audience member and get them up on stage to fill in.
So begins a highly-abridged skip through the rest of the play, as our hapless victim tries his best to get through the performance. A few years ago we had The Generation Game on TV, which often featured something similar – competitors being given a short scene to perform, which were often quite amusing and involved lines being written on various props or pieces of scenery for them to read. Not so here, where the poor man had nearly an hour and a half to get through, mostly without benefit of a script, and often without any prompting from other cast members either. What starts as an amusing device rapidly becomes embarrassing as sections of the audience find his discomfiture increasingly hilarious.
On a positive note, credit must be given to the cast members who manage the unpredictable nature of the process well and show their own skills at improvisation. Tom Bulpett gives us an amusing and increasingly desperate and hard-up director, Simon Slough, who sees his paycheck rapidly going down the drain, with Guido Garcia Lueches (Algernon), Trynity Silk (Gwendolen), Amy Cooke-Hodgson (Lady Bracknell) and Rhys Tees (Lane and various other characters) managing to keep things more or less on course despite the unpredictable nature of the dialogue and cast positioning. There’s some moments of great amusement too from Ben Mann as Josh, a stagehand who’s reluctant to appear anywhere in the spotlight.
The snippets of Wilde’s dialogue that we hear remind us how funny the original play actually is, and what we see from the professional actors is often very funny. It’s a shame that we see so little of it and that the entire premise is about getting people to laugh at other audience members more than they are laughing at the cast.
Running at just an hour and forty minutes, the play is mercifully short but as more and more audience members get dragged onto the stage to fill missing roles even the 35 minutes of Act 2 start to feel interminable. You can’t help but wonder whether the members of the audience who had been selected found the experience quite as entertaining as some of those who remained in their seats did. Full credit to those members of the audience who find themselves on stage and have to go through this – the ones chosen are almost never those who put themselves forward but are selected apparently at random from people sitting quietly trying to watch the show.
If you find entertainment in people’s embarrassment and misfortune, you’ll have a ball (as long as you’re not one of those chosen). If not, it’s probably best to give it a miss.
Runs until 4 November 2023 and on tour