Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 5 stars James Corden isn’t an obvious matinee idol. Such is his wide-eyed control over the audience in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Richard Bean’s audacious reinvention of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, however, that it’s impossible not to warm to his barn-stormingly full-on performance. Corden’s TV-friendly features help, of course, in what, in Bean, Hytner and especially physical comedy director Cal McCrystal’s hands is transformed into a riotous end-of- the-pier seaside postcard sit-com. Bean sets things in Brighton during 1963, that crucial year, as poet Philip Larkin put it, when sexual intercourse began ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles first LP’. It was also the year the skiffle boom was stamped on by rock and roll, as Corden’s estuarised harlequin Francis Henshall finds to his cost when he and his washboard are chucked out of his band. Out of such adversity, Francis blags his way into t
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.