The bed rock of English Farce?
Take a comic J B Priestley play, cut out the preachy and political bits (perhaps 40 minutes) – leave in the gags and absurdity, get the cast to think Feydeau or Whitehall Farce and you have 100 minutes (plus an interval) of sheer comedy – well you do if you have a solid and capable ensemble cast.
What do three ‘respectable’ couples (would be pillars of any Ibsen community) do when they discover, celebrating 25 years of marriage (they were all married on the same day by the same priest) that the priest was never then licenced to conduct marriages, and that far from being respectable they have been living in twenty-five years of sin?
When the first revelations of their problem are overheard by a gossipy, not to say hilariously malicious maid of all work (Janice Connolly) who they have just fired. And when each partner suddenly sees the freedom from very irksome relationships that such a revelation offers.
Throw in an unexpected bar maid, who may know them better than they think (the striking Tori Allen-Martin) and the ever dependable Ron Cook as an increasingly inebriated newspaper photographer and you have a good cast, made even better by the three not-wives – (Siobhan Finneran, Samantha Spiro and Sophie Thompson).
It’s a very good production of a play which might have the tendency to drag, slightly, but which has been turned into a comic tour-de-force. And on which many more modern playwrights could base their own comic turns.