The Man In The White Suit
Wyndham’s Theatre, London Until January 11, 2hrs 5mins
‘Why can’t you scientists leave things alone,’ says a charlady in the 1951 black-and-white Ealing comedy on which this is based. I felt the same way about theatre adapters mucking up classic films while I sat through this babyish travesty of a comic masterpiece.
It’s a shame, as the show is set in the post-war period and fronted by Stephen Mangan, a genial comic actor with big Fifties teeth. He plays the hapless inventor Sidney Stratton – the Alec Guinness part in the original film – who invents an everlasting polymer fabric that never gets dirty.
Clothes made of it will never wear out.
The show is set in the post-war period and fronted by Stephen Mangan, a genial comic actor with big Fifties teeth and joined by the lissom Kara Tointon as Daphne (both above)
That means no jobs for the mill-workers and nosediving profits for the factory owners. Suddenly, the idealistic Sidney finds himself the enemy of the people, the unions and bosses.
Even the cosy washerwoman – Sue Johnston in crinkly tights, a sight I’m keen to forget – thinks Sidney’s a fool.
Mangan is joined by the lissom Kara Tointon as Daphne, unenviably stuck in the part played on screen by the sublime, sexy-voiced Joan Greenwood. A Strictly Come Dancing winner, Tointon has a seduction scene designed simply to show off her slinky pins.
Richard Cordery overacts as her blustering bore of a father; Richard Durden is the cruel capitalist.
I grew increasingly irritated by writer-director Sean Foley’s garish adaptation, with its fart-noise laboratory, innuendo and bunged-in Brexit references. The show, meanwhile, neglects the film’s delicious, gentle cynicism, and its lesson that nothing lasts for ever except human frailty.
The recipe here is to keep things frantic and noisy. There’s a skiffle band, ghastly pub songs (by Noah and the Whale’s Charlie Fink) and, worse, an outbreak of clog-dancing.
Only the final chase on an L S Lowry-style townscape evokes any real Ealing charm.
If you don’t know the film and love Mangan, you can expect two hours of farcical northern nonsense and add an extra star to this review. But in my view, an imperishable English classic has been turned into a crass theatrical knees-up.
Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of)
Bristol Old Vic Touring until March, 2hrs 45mins
Rating: 
In this rambunctious, Glasgow-originated show, a cast of six women play servants acting out the novel. It’s fast and feminist, but it’s also infectiously funny. Moreover, despite the offputting ‘sort of’ tag, the book’s plot is fully intact.
Forget Colin Firth and costumed actors poncing about in the usual BBC style. Expect modern props, Doc Martens, and karaoke disco hits at the drop of a bonnet. Elizabeth even belts out You’re So Vain at Mr Darcy, the Carly Simon song that Jane Austen might well have written herself.
The dialogue is loaded with non-Regency profanities, and the famous Netherfield Ball is an almighty drunken bender. The five sisters throng bolshily under the eye of the squawking Mrs Bennet.
In this rambunctious, Glasgow-originated show, a cast of six women play servants acting out the novel. It’s fast and feminist, but it’s also infectiously funny
Mr Bennet never says a single word – that’s because he isn’t even an actor, just a propped-up newspaper in an armchair!
In this account (by the company Blood Of The Young), the spirit of Jane Austen is somehow preserved in this wacky reimagining of the book, one that removes the stately home theatrics to find a very different sense and sensibility, involving beer crates and hand microphones.
It’s emotionally fraught, too. Writer Isobel McArthur (she also plays Darcy and Mrs Bennet) amplifies Austen’s focus on the brutal economic reality for the book’s women.
It’s a crisis embodied in Meghan Tyler’s grieving Elizabeth (above with Felixe Forde), an obstreperous ‘persona non-starter’, emotionally devastated at her sisters’ stark choice
It’s a crisis embodied in Meghan Tyler’s grieving Elizabeth, an obstreperous ‘persona non-starter’, emotionally devastated at her sisters’ stark choice: marriage or destitution.
Pining love erupts over the stage in the old-gold soundtrack that includes Candi Staton, Andy Williams, Pulp, The Shirelles and Etta James. It’s mad but it works.
Why not frogmarch an Eng Lit-studying teenager to what they think will be a boring Jane Austen night out – then watch their sulky face light up at what follows.
The Niceties
Finborough Theatre, London Until October 26, 2hrs
Rating: 
Don’t ever envy an American professor. This one (played by musical star Janie Dee) is making suggestions to a black student on how to improve her essay on the effect of slavery on the American Revolution.
The student, Zoe, thinks her paper has all it needs. While Zoe talks like a flaky millennial, she is in fact made of titanium. Seething at what she sees as the professor’s patronising, racist, white privilege, she ruthlessly sets out to destroy her career.
This campus play – set in the Obama era – starts out with a buzz. But author Eleanor Burgess’s sympathies are too weighted in favour of the verbose but decent, lesbian, liberal prof to be dramatic.
An American Professor (Janie Dee) is making suggestions to a black student (Moronke Akinola) on how to improve her essay on the effect of slavery on the American Revolution
I found myself rooting for the take-no-prisoners student, superbly played with a fierce sense of grievance by newcomer Moronke Akinola.
The steam, however, completely goes out of the thing in the over-talky second half, as the professor – Janie Dee visibly struggling with her cardboard part – negotiates her fate. Successful plays for two actors are rare. This isn’t one of them.
The Last King Of Scotland
Crucible, Sheffield Until Saturday, 2hrs 45mins
Rating: 
First a novel in 1998, then an award-winning film, now Giles Foden’s grimly believable story about a Scottish doctor who becomes right-hand man to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is adapted for the stage by Steve Waters.
It’s always absorbing, offering a double image of two men capable of incredible self-delusion. And it boasts a terrific performance by Tobi Bamtefa, who captures the knife-edge capriciousness of the megalomaniac Amin.
He brings a big, tough presence – but also a sense of the ridiculous, a huge laugh and excellent comic timing. Daniel Portman is too inscrutable as the doctor, Nick Garrigan, however: the motivations for his ethical slide aren’t always clear.
It boasts a terrific performance by Tobi Bamtefa, who captures the knife-edge capriciousness of the megalomaniac Amin but Daniel Portman is too inscrutable as the doctor, Nick Garrigan
And until its harrowing final part, Gbolahan Obisesan’s production lacks dynamism and danger. It might have worked better in a more intimate space – the action feels too diffuse on the Crucible’s big stage, and it could be bolder with its use of music and movement.
The Last King Of Scotland proves – once more – a powerful story about the grotesque rise and fall of a despot, but this play doesn’t make a strong case for theatre being the best way to tell it.
Holly Williams
My Beautiful Laundrette
Curve, Leicester Touring until November 9, 2hrs 25mins
Rating:
Hanif Kureishi has adapted his seminal 1985 film, about an unlikely love affair between Omar, a young man of Pakistani heritage, and Johnny, a white youth, for the stage.
The movie broke boundaries and crisply critiqued Thatcherite Britain; the play’s portrayal of Omar’s entrepreneurial family still feels stereotype-busting, and the racial tensions have obvious resonance in an era when the far-Right is on the rise.
But Kureishi’s style – an elliptical, off-kilter, heightened naturalism – can pose challenges, and Nikolai Foster’s production rarely rises to them. The jokes never land, the pace is off, and no one really plays the subtext.
There are lovely moments, such as the pride and pleasure Omar (Omar Malik) and Johnny (Jonny Fines, very good) take in cleaning up the grotty laundrette Omar’s uncle gives him
There are occasional lovely moments, such as the pride and pleasure Omar (Omar Malik) and Johnny (Jonny Fines, very good) take in cleaning up the grotty laundrette Omar’s uncle gives him. But too often characters feel two-dimensional.
Grace Smart’s set evokes the period with Day-Glo graffiti, neon signage and scaffolding – but its junkyard clutter hampers the actors stuck in its midst. And Foster’s production squanders one of its great selling points: they got Pet Shop Boys to compose new music, yet we hear little more than snatches of synths in scene changes.
As with much else here, it seems like a missed opportunity.
Holly Williams