Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
There is much gold to be
had in Gary McNair’s rollicking reimagining of Ben Jonson’s Jacobean farce,
which shifts the action from a London town-house to what in Charlotte Lane’s
two-tiered construction looks like an upmarket Byres Road bordello crammed with
the product of the last charity shop spree. It may be fool’s gold, but the scam
set up by Louise McCarthy’s servant, Face, entrusted with looking after the big
house with Grant O’Rourke’s similarly combative con-man, Subtle, sees the local
toffs buy willingly into their pseudo-mystical hokum.
Those who come knocking include
a roll-call of posh-boy desperadoes, a pair of priests in search of
enlightenment, a hipster coffee shop owner intent on groovying up the
neighbourhood, a randy old duffer with lascivious intent and a Kelvinside
schoolboy who’d sell his sister while learning to swear.
All this is played out
by way of McNair’s deliciously fruity rhyming couplets as old money and new run
up against each other in increasingly madcap fashion in Andy Arnold’s
production, which sees his cast of six whizzing their way through numerous
entrances and exits, ushered along by Oguz Kaplangi’s matching frenetic score.
Working alongside
McCarthy and O’Rourke, Robert Jack, Neshla Caplan, Jo Freer and Stephen Clyde
all throw themselves into each part with a collective abandon that ramps up the
desperation of the rich buy their way into a faddy form of nirvana. Face and
Subtle’s willingness to exploit such mass gullibility may come out of
necessity, but as Face discovers to her cost, the divide between the haves and
the have-nots exists only because the haves will take what they can while the
rest of us let them. The result is a pricelessly funny romp that proves to be
an embarrassment of riches.
The Herald, October 9th 2019
ends
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