Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh
3 stars
“These are the times we live in,” says Barney Cashman, the man at the centre of Neil Simon’s high-as-you-like mid 1960s rom-com which attempts to come to terms with the trickle-down effect of what had not long been announced as the permissive society. Barney’s looking for something beautiful. Whether he finds it in his attempts at conducting a swinging affair in his mother’s apartment with a trio of very different women is a different matter.
First up is Fletcher Mathers’ straight-talking Elaine, who Barney picks up in his fish restaurant, but is too full-on to salve a mid-life crisis that yearns for bachelor pad lounge-core. Next comes Lisa Gardner’s hippy chick Bobbi Michelle, who moves from kooky to highly-strung to full-on fruit-loop enough to scare Barney into submission. Finally, a sartorially transformed Barney moves closer to home by taking up with his wife’s friend Jeannette, played by Jane McCarry, and with who he learns the hardest lesson of all.
Michael Emans’ production for his Rapture Theatre Company stays faithful to this gentlest of period pieces, even if it does almost over-egg Barney’s transformation from blue-suited suburbanite to red velvet clad would-be lothario. Onstage throughout the play’s three acts, Billy Mack plays Barney with a self-deprecating sense of his own ridiculousness as he has the tables turned on him by each woman in turn. Beyond the dry New York one-liners, though, this is clearly a play of its time, which, like Mad Men, reflects an increasingly neurotic America, at odds with itself and trying to fill the void where old values used to be with pills, pot and illicit trysts. Some things, it seems, never change.
The Herald, February 9th 2009
ends
3 stars
“These are the times we live in,” says Barney Cashman, the man at the centre of Neil Simon’s high-as-you-like mid 1960s rom-com which attempts to come to terms with the trickle-down effect of what had not long been announced as the permissive society. Barney’s looking for something beautiful. Whether he finds it in his attempts at conducting a swinging affair in his mother’s apartment with a trio of very different women is a different matter.
First up is Fletcher Mathers’ straight-talking Elaine, who Barney picks up in his fish restaurant, but is too full-on to salve a mid-life crisis that yearns for bachelor pad lounge-core. Next comes Lisa Gardner’s hippy chick Bobbi Michelle, who moves from kooky to highly-strung to full-on fruit-loop enough to scare Barney into submission. Finally, a sartorially transformed Barney moves closer to home by taking up with his wife’s friend Jeannette, played by Jane McCarry, and with who he learns the hardest lesson of all.
Michael Emans’ production for his Rapture Theatre Company stays faithful to this gentlest of period pieces, even if it does almost over-egg Barney’s transformation from blue-suited suburbanite to red velvet clad would-be lothario. Onstage throughout the play’s three acts, Billy Mack plays Barney with a self-deprecating sense of his own ridiculousness as he has the tables turned on him by each woman in turn. Beyond the dry New York one-liners, though, this is clearly a play of its time, which, like Mad Men, reflects an increasingly neurotic America, at odds with itself and trying to fill the void where old values used to be with pills, pot and illicit trysts. Some things, it seems, never change.
The Herald, February 9th 2009
ends
Comments