Ellie
Beaven as Mrs Littledick and the cast of A Mad World My Masters. Photo: Manuel
Harlan
Reviewed by James Karas
A Mad World My Masters is
an exuberant theatrical entertainment that grabs whatever it can from a number
of genres to generate energy and sheer fun. It has enough singing and dancing
to quality as a musical. It has elements of farce, slapstick, raunchy and
boisterous comedy to keep the audience thoroughly regaled.
A Mad World was written by Thomas Middleton in 1605 and the current
production by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English Touring Theatre is
billed as “edited by Sean Foley and Phil Porter.” Don’t believe it. It is like
saying that Shaw’s Pygmalion is
“edited” be Lerner and Loewe to make My
Fair Lady.
Foley and Porter have moved the
action to seedy, lively, bawdy, hooker-happy Soho of the 1950’s. They have
changed many of the names of the characters from incomprehensible Jacobean to
juicy modern ones: Sir Bounteous Progress, the rich old knight who curries
favour with the nobility is renamed Sir Bounteous Peersucker. The jealous Shortrod Harebrain gets the more colouful name of Mr.
Littledick.
With
names like Dick Follywit, Penitent Brothel, Spunky, Sponger and Sir Andrew
Fondlewife you know you are in the world of sex comedy where references to and
puns about reproductive organs, to put it politely, will abound. And boy, do
they.
Between
the singing by the marvelously-voiced Linda-John Pierre, the pratfalls, the occasionally
overdone slapstick and the aforementioned linguistic free-for-all, there are
several plots that require significant comic talents to do them justice.
Ian
Redford is the rich old fool of New Comedy who has a young mistress called
Truly Kidman (Sarah Ridgeway) and a poor nephew in Follywit (Joe Bannister).
Redford provides considerable comedy as the doddering fool who is robbed but
never loses his adoration of nobles.
Bannister
as the wily and agile Follywit pursues his uncle for money and the “virgin”
Truly for other things. Truly’s pimp and mother (played by Ishia Bennison) has
sown up Truly fifteen times back into virginity in the hope of getting her the
proper husband.
Sarah Ridgeway
as Truly Kidman and Ellie Beaven as Mrs Littledick. Photo: Manuel Harlan
Moving
right along, we have Mrs. Littledick (Ellie Beaven) who wants what her jealous
husband (Ben Deery) cannot provide but what Penitent Brothel (Dennis Herdman)
can and does. While Littledick is listening and misapprehending what his wife
is doing, we see her and her lover perform a shadow sex show behind the sheer
curtains of a bed.
The
actors interact with the audience quite frequently from pointing at people in
the theatre, to engaging spectators in the front row, all to good effect.
The
singing and the dancing are well integrated into the plot. The scenes from Soho
bars to street scenes to interior sets are done efficiently and the frantic,
joyous atmosphere is always maintained. There are frequent references to
current events but much of Middleton’s text is retained.
Kudos
to Sean Foley who directs the production in addition to “editing” Middleton’s
text. He is able to inject life and energy in every scene and show abundant
comic inventiveness.
There
are some sequences that seemed overdone – the falling into the garbage can
continued long after it ceased to be amusing - but overall this entertainment reaches
from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century with gusto and flamboyance.
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