'One Man, Two Guvnors' (PBS)

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced that it would broadcast Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning comedy One Man, Two Guvnors as an episode of Great Performances.  I didn’t see One Man live when it was on Broadway, so I watched the Great Performances broadcast that night.  Since the New York theaters have been closed since March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to write up my impressions of the performance for Rick On Theater just as I would do for a live show. 

One Man, Two Guvnors had its television première on the evening of Friday, 6 November 2020, on Great Performances, the PBS anthology series dedicated to the performing arts.  The video, part of the program’s “Broadway’s Best,” is actually a live performance recorded in 2011 by London’s Royal National Theatre and released as National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors, produced by David Sabel and directed for the screen by Robin Lough. 

National Theatre Live is an initiative of the National Theatre which broadcasts performances of the theater company’s productions (and some from other theaters) live via satellite to cinemas and arts centers around the world.  (Except for the ensemble, who were cast in New York, and one featured role, the cast of the National Theatre video is the same as the opening-night Broadway cast.)

One Man is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, a 1745 Commedia dell’arte-style farce by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-93; see my ROT reports “The Servant of Two Masters (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012),” 9 July 2012, and “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005),” 29 July 2012). 

Richard Bean (b, 1956) was born in East Hull, a port city on the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, near England’s east coast.  He studied social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (about 105 miles south of Hull), and then worked as an occupational psychologist. 

Bean worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.  This was the setting for his second play, Toast (1999; see my report on ROT on 19 May 2016), which I saw as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway.  (There’s a bit of a biography of the playwright in that report.)

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean also worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the BBC Radio show Control Group Six which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.  (Control Group Six, a series with an experimental format that interspersed unrelated sketches in an unfolding storyline based on a dark-tinged, futuristic thriller, ran in two series in 1995 and 1997.)

One Man, Two Guvnors opened under the direction of Nicholas Hytner (Tonys for the 1994 Lincoln Center revival of Carousel and the 2006 Broadway début of The History Boys—which also featured James Corden, the lead in One Man) at the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre on 24 May 2011, closing on 19 September. 

It toured the United Kingdom for five weeks in September and October and then opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 21 November and ran until 25 February 2012 when it transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March; the London production of One Man closed on 1 March 2014. 

The show won Best Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for 2011 and was nominated for a 2012 Olivier Award: for Best New Play.  One Man went out on a second UK tour in 2012 and ’13 and an international tour in 2013.  Then it had a third UK tour in 2014 and ’15.

A Broadway mounting premièred at  the Music Box Theatre on 18 April 2012.  The limited engagement concluded on 2 September, a run of 159 regular performances, and received seven Tony nominations; Corden won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Leading Role In A Play.  One Man was also nominated for and won three Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Actor In A Play (Corden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Tom Edden), and Outstanding Music In A Play (Grant Olding). 

In addition to the National Theatre Live video (and now the PBS broadcast), Fox Searchlight Pictures and Damian Jones have signed on to produce a feature film adaptation of One Man, Two Guvnors.  Oli Refson is writing the screenplay.  Though no casting, including the lead role of Francis Henshall, has been announced, playwright Bean and stage director Hytner will serve as executive producers.  No release date has been announced.

According to a BBC News report, Bean had to change parts of the play for a U.S. audience before it opened in New York.  For instance, the author remarked that he had to rewrite all the cricket references because we Americans don’t understand them.  He indicated some other local jokes that he felt wouldn’t go over on this side of the Atlantic were also replaced.

“But Bean, a former stand-up comedian, promises that the changes won't be too drastic,” added reporter Tim Masters, who interviewed the playwright for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  “The reason that the play works,” explained Bean, ”is that it is end-of-the-pier British comedy and obviously we’re not going to destroy that.”  He was referring to the bawdy, old-fashioned style of broad comedy provided by British music halls, often located at the end of the pleasure piers in seaside resorts.

The PBS broadcast is the London edition of the play, so the British jokes, of course, hadn’t been excised.  There are indeed several jokes, some of them extended or recurring, that must have made more sense to the Brits in the house (who laughed uproariously at every one) than they did to me.

One example was Lloyd Boateng (Trevor Laird), Charlie’s friend from Jamaica’s repeated references to Parkhurst.  Lloyd says that was where he learned to be a chef (he owns a pub that “does food” and is catering the party that opens the play) and where he learned about “true love.”  Well, obviously it’s some place where those experiences wouldn’t be expected and it must be a place where it would be incongruous for them both to occur. 

I guessed correctly, but I had to look it up to be certain: the reference is to Her Majesty’s Prison Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, once one of the toughest jails in the British Isles where many notable criminals were incarcerated.  A Brit would obviously know this without recourse to Wikipedia; it’s not as funny if you have to look it up later.

Playwright Richard Bean reset One Man in the British seaside resort town of Brighton in 1963.  The plot centers on an out-of-work musician named Francis Henshall (James Corden, currently the host of CBS’s Late Late Show), recently fired from his skiffle band, who becomes a bodyguard/minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a petty East End crook.  

Little does Francis know that Roscoe, supposedly in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s father, is actually dead and his twin sister, Rachel (Jemima Rooper), is now masquerading as her brother, killed by her boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).  (Is everybody following this?) 

There’s a repeated joke about whether Roscoe and Rachel can be “identical twins” if they’re of different genders.  It’s a mark of the intelligence of many of the characters that they can’t comprehend this distinction.  (One character even discourses on the scientific difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins.  Now there’s an apt topic for low comedy for ya.)

To complicate matters even more, when the perpetually ravenous Francis sees the chance for an extra meal ticket, he takes on a second job with Stanley, an upper class twit who’s hiding out from the police and waiting to be reunited with Rachel.  To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his “two guvnors” apart, an increasingly difficult predicament as the two are both staying in the same pub named The Cricketers Arms, resulting in farcical mayhem.

Roiling events still further is local mobster Charlie “the Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway), who had arranged the engagement of his daughter, Pauline (Claire Lams), to Roscoe despite her preference for over-the-top amateur actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby).  (So, an over-the-top actor in an over-the-top farce.  How does Bean come up with this stuff?)

(By the way, I tried to find a British slang explanation for calling someone a “duck,” but I was unsuccessful.  The context seems to be that Charlie’s cheap—a skinflint and chiseler—and Lloyd says of him in one exchange, “Man!  They don’t call you ‘Charlie the Duck’ for nothing!  Tight man!”)

Even more complications are prompted by several letters, a very heavy trunk, a number of unlucky audience “volunteers,” an extremely elderly waiter named Alfie (Tom Edden), and Francis’s pursuit of his twin passions: food and drink, and Charlie’s “women’s-libber” bookkeeper, Dolly (Suzie Toase).

One Man got James Corden a Tony (2012’s Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role In A Play) and led to his gig as the host of The Late Late Show.  (I only watched the first show of TLLS and decided I didn’t like it—or Corden—so I haven’t followed it.)  I didn’t much care for the play—it was like a semi-literate Benny Hill sketch (i.e., not Monty Python!  Or even Fawlty Towers). 

I’ve blogged before on TV versions of plays—The Originalist, for one (see my report on ROT, 17 July 2017), before I saw it live—so this isn’t unprecedented.  I also actually like silliness—as ROTters may have noticed in my reaction to Something Rotten! (see my report, 14 May 2016), plus my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (16 October 2014), which had me howling in my seat!—but I draw the line at that really low humor the Brits love, but which makes me cringe.

(“That real bottom-of-the-barrel English humor is an acquired taste, I think,” my friend Kirk Woodward said to me when I told him my thoughts on writing up the performance of One Man, “based mostly on the fact that Pat [Kirk’s late wife], a deep-dyed Anglophile, didn’t like it either.”  My sense of the British taste for “knickers humor” isn’t so much that it’s “acquired,” but that it’s something its fans never grew out of. 

(Why the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shaw, and Eliot has such a love affair with that knickers stuff is a mystery to me.  They still do Punch ’n’ Judy shows and—have you ever seen a “panto”?  They’re a combo of juvenile and prurient.  I say it’s a case of national arrested development.  That’s just MHO, of course.)

One example of what I mean—Bean’s frequent not-so-subtle allusions to sex.  One of Charlie’s party guests is his lawyer, Harry Dangle.  He’s the father of Pauline’s fiancé, Alan.  His law firm is Dangle, Berry, and Bush.  In addition to the puerile references to a man’s groin and genitalia (I hope I don’t have to spell that out for you!), there’s the added frisson of “Dangle, Berry” sounding awfully close to ‘dingleberry.’  Enough said?

(It’s not as if One Man, Two Guvnors is an all-out, sex-obsessed knickers farce.  It’s not.  Chris and Rooper find themselves hobbling around near the end of the play with their pants down around their ankles—but the joke is more about watching them try to walk around the stage with their trouser down than seeing them in underwear.  Earlier, Chris does make an entrance shirtless—but what’s supposed to be funny there is that he’s wearing a rug both on his chest and his back!  Both bits are more silly than funny—but, again, that’s just me.)

I found Bean’s Commedia travesty self-indulgent and the script a pastiche of bits from crusty old British farces that reminded me mostly of the Carry On franchise of 1958-78 with its bawdy  music-hall humor—right down to the casual homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and xenophobia. 

Bean points his insult gun at a wide range of topics, including women (and men), actors, The Beatles (especially Ringo), lawyers, cops, boarding schools and boarding school alumni, gays (and lesbians), religion(s), and old people. 

At least in passing, the play pokes stereotypical fun at foreigners like Spaniards and Italians, and countries like Canada (boring) and Japan, but Australia, where everyone apparently loves opera, comes in for the most frequent jabs. 

By the way, the Aussie’s obsession with opera is a new one on me; I’d never heard that about them.  What’s more, the juxtaposition of Australia and opera doesn’t seem nearly funny enough to merit three mentions.  Must be a Brit thing.

The problem is that while Bean’s parodying dated and bigoted tropes, he’s also perpetuating them.  It’s a shame because at the time he was composing One Man, Europe in particular was embarking on a rapid descent into xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-refugee politics that soon caught on here as well.  We have just debarrassed ourselves of a president who based his appeal and many of his policies on those sorts of forces.

What the play celebrates (if that’s the right word) is stupidity and ignorance.  The frequent refrain from Pauline Clench is a confused “I don’t understand!” and after one such cry, Alan, her beloved, declaims, “This is why I love her.  She is pure, innocent, unsoiled by education, like a new bucket.” 

The idea of a woman so empty-headed it renders her irresistible is surely a conceit we don’t need to go back to.  (See what I mean about the Carry On flicks and Benny Hill humor?  In case I didn’t make myself clear: I’m not a fan of Benny Hill and his genre of imbecilic “comedy.”)  But Pauline’s not the only example of this gambit. 

Her father’s the one with the difficulty over identical and fraternal twins, and Francis, the title character, isn’t terribly swift upstairs, either.  (“You’re not exactly a Swiss watch, are you,” says Stanley, one of Francis’s guvnors, to him—though that product of a British public school isn’t terribly bright himself.)

I thought stupidity as a virtue went out with the Three Stooges (whom I admit, I could never stand, even as a little boy).

I have to say, despite my obvious distaste for the play—Goldoni ought to be spinning in his grave, along with Giorgio Strehler, the Italian director whose métier was classic Commedia farce, especially Servant of Two Masters—the stage work was quite good.  It doesn’t hurt that the British have always been good at physical comedy; we Yanks have only caught up some in the last couple of decades or so.

There was a lot of physical humor in One Man, just as there would be in a Commedia dell’arte performance—pratfalls, stunts, faces, mime, and more—and it was all handled very well.  Hytner and his physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal, put the actors through their paces.

One of the best-performed bits was a tumble Francis takes right at the top of the show.  When James Corden enters, he tosses peanuts in the air and catches them in his mouth.  On his last toss, he back into an armchair which topples over backwards, taking Corden with it.  After a second or two, up he pops, announcing, “I got it!” and sticking out his tongue with the peanut upon it.  (Obviously, the last bit of this gag only really works visually on camera.)

There’s a caveat here, though.  I felt that almost all the physical turns, which were contrived and stock (as they were in Commedia dell’arte as well, of course), were also gratuitous.  They barely connected to the plot—they were “set pieces,” routines that could have been dropped in almost anywhere, and in any farce irrespective of plot. 

The best bit of physical acting was performed by Tom Edden as Alfie the ancient waiter in The Cricketers Arms.  Alfie’s 87, a World War I vet, and has nearly every frailty you can imagine: he’s deaf, suffers from tremors, has a balance problem, wears a pacemaker—and it’s his first day on the job.

Edden’s made to look like a cross among Boris Karloff, Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.  He performs spectacular pratfalls as doors are slammed into his face and he goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat when his pacemaker is turned up to 9.  

He does an almost unbelievable tumble that goes from teetering in the edge of the top step with his back to a flight of stairs to almost falling on his face on the landing—and just as we think he’s going to recover, he swivels and falls headfirst down the stairs (out of our sight, of course).

But he ought to have won his Drama Desk Award  for one gag alone: his slow, jittery cross with an empty soup bowl with a spoon in it on top of a plate from the serving table at center stage to the door to the dining room at stage left—raising such a clinking, clattering racket that before he can reach the door, Francis grabs him, opens the door, and shoves Alfie into the room just to stop the noise.  Talk about your coup de théâtre!

All the actors are good at the direct address to the audience, which is used a great deal in One Man—the breaking of the fourth wall.  They all do it well, but Suzie Toase’s Dolly uses it best.  Her character’s a stock mid-20th-century farce figure, the man-hungry woman, but Bean imbues her with a kind of wisdom no other character in One Man possesses. 

Toase uses the direct address exchanges as little lessons she aims at the women in the audience (but which have significance to the men as well).  Her asides seem more part of her character than those of the others; theirs somehow seem like shifts in gear.

Corden, however, is the master of ad libs and interaction with the audience.  One Man has a lot of audience participation, including three spectators who are brought onto the stage.  He handles the ad libs with complete confidence, as if it’s all scripted and rehearsed—and as if it isn’t the most terrifying thing an actor can be asked to do.

I’ve had occasion to have to improvise with fellow actors on stage—when something goes amiss and we had to cover—and I can tell you that every time it happened, my heart was in my throat and every minute that passed until we got back on track creeped along at a 10 to 1 ratio: one minute of real time seemed like 10 minutes inside my head.  Having to improvise with a member of the audience is scarier still!

In one bit, Corden brings two young men up to help him move a heavy trunk,  He’d done a solo attempt to lift it to no avail.  In the banter, after setting up the gag, Corden asks the two men, “Have either of you two got your Equity card?” He’s referring to the membership card for the British actors’ union, formerly officially titled the British Actors’ Equity Association.  Of course, neither man was a union member, it was just banter and everyone chuckled.

But whenever I see a bit like that in a show, I always wonder what would happen if the spectator was a union member?  What would the actor do if the “volunteer” pulled out his Equity card as Corden asked?  What would he do?  What would the stage manager do?  It’s just a fantasy I have—but I wonder if it’s ever happened.

Not all the volunteers get off so easily as Jess and Corey.  Take Christine, whom Corden brings on stage at the end of the first act when he’s frantically serving dinner to his two guvnors, each in a different dining room off stage while he’s in the middle trying to wait on them and steal food for himself from their orders.

Poor Christine is pushed around the stage, at one point shoved under the serving table.   She’s soaked with water when a crèpe Suzette flames up out of control (intentionally), and then she’s sprayed with fire extinguisher foam.  Finally, she’s led off by a stage manager, soaking wet and covered in white foam.

She has to be a plant—no one could treat an actual spectator like that and not get sued or even arrested for assault.  Christine’s dress was probably ruined—at the very least it would cost a lot to clean it.  But if she’s an actress planted in the audience for this scene, she’s excellent at playing the surprised and unwitting civilian, and sounding like a non-professional when she speaks.  I have no idea.

I can say, it made me uncomfortable to watch this all unfold.  I certainly left the play for quite a while as this went on.  I’m not sure that’s a good outcome.

As you can probably tell from the Drama Desk Award for Music in a Play that One Man, Two Guvnors is a play with music.  (Yeah, I know—Duuh!)  Don’t mistake that with a musical, in which the songs and dialogue are integrated (hopefully) and the music helps move the plot along.  In One Man, the songs are interludes—they aren’t character- or plot-driven and they’re mostly sung by singers outside the narrative of the script.  (They are joined occasionally by actors from the play—but not characters.)

In this case, the singers and musicians are a pop band led by Grant Olding, who also wrote the music and lyrics.  (He won that Drama Desk Award.)  Since Francis Henshaw was a member of a skiffle band, The Crave, as Olding (or Bean) named this combo, is appropriately also a skiffle band. 

(I won’t give an elaborate definition of skiffle music, but it’s an old American folk tradition that was given a revival in the U.K. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  Some of the instruments played by a skiffle band are homemade or improvised; Francis, for instance, had been a washboard player before he was fired.  The Beatles, some of you may know, began as a skiffle band, first known as the Quarrymen, in the late 1950s.)

The Craze is made up (in the video; it was changed in the Broadway mounting) of Olding on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica; Philip James on guitar, banjo, and back-up vocals; Richard Coughlan on double bass, electric bass, and back-up vocals; and Ben Brooker on percussion including washboard and spoons, drums, and back-up vocals. 

Except when they need more room on stage and the bass and drums move below the platform, stage right, the band plays “in one” in front of the closed front curtain.  Dressed in skinny mauve suits (let’s remember the year in which the play’s set—who remembers Carnaby Street?), with Olding wearing Buddy Holly glasses, The Crave stand behind mikes that rise from the stage and sing during scene changes.

The lyrics comment on, but don’t reiterate, the characters and, to a lesser degree, plot developments of the play.  They sort of capture the mood of the play at that moment.  I confess that to my musically un-learned ear, the tunes largely sound repetitive, serving mostly as time-fillers.

After the first number, the combo was joined in succeeding songs by Corden on a small xylophone (he seems quite adept) and then Martyn Ellis  (who plays the lawyer Harry Dangle) on uke and vocals.  Ellis actually does a solo until he’s joined by Daniel Rigby (Alan) accompanying him with body percussion (he slaps his chest with his open hands).

Claire Lams, Suzie Toase, and Jemima Rooper (Pauline, Dolly, and Rachel), in blond bouffant wigs and early ’60s crinoline dresses do an Andrews Sisters-/ McGuire Sisters-style number and finally, Oliver Chris (Stanley Stubbers) performs a solo horn-honking routine on a dozen small brass bulb horns mounted on a rack.

Because National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors was an international broadcast, reviews were published all over the world.  I’m going to try to sample a range of outlets, since all the reviewers saw the same performance, and we’ll see if there are any differences in regional or media-type coverage. 

(I’ll be particularly curious to see how Australian reviewers felt about One Man, considering how many times playwright Bean branded Down Under as a “terrible godforsaken place.”  A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that Bean turned down the application of an Australian theater company to produce One Man, Two Guvnors because of the jokes at the country’s expense.

(“If it’s Australian actors doing that material it’s not going to work,” explained Bean, “but if Australian audiences see English actors doing it, they’ll understand it and it will be fine.”)

Here’s a survey of selected reviews from around the world and across the country.  I’ve restricted myself to reviews of National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors rather than the live presentation at the Lyttleton.

In The Times of London, Clive Davis watched the streaming version of the NT Live performance.  When his companion began to lose interest in the production before the end of the first act, he confessed that “to be frank I could understand why.”  James Corden’s “insane energy is what carries the convoluted storyline,” Davis judged..

“Even so,” he wondered, “can’t you have too much of his popeyed rants and hyperactive clowning?  This is a comedy that starts with the dial turned up to ten and never looks back.”

The Times writer continued: “At nearly three hours including an interval, it’s also much too long,” adding, “The musical interludes could all be ditched.” 

Davis acknowledged, “I didn't particularly enjoy this production,” but he pondered: “Would I have laughed more if I had been sitting next to flesh-and-blood people rather than my cat?  I'm not sure I would.”

Also from London, The Arts Desk’s Aleks Sierz dubbed the play a “gloriously silly farce . . . starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.”  In the scene in which Francis tries to serve his two guvnors dinner at the same time while keeping them apart from one another, Sierz felt that “the show’s slapstick reaches a pitch of intensity that is both viscerally funny and mind-bogglingly imaginative, with great comic work by Tom Edden as Alfie.”

“The show’s typical edginess means that we are encouraged to laugh at this oldie’s disability,” pointed out the reviewer, “which is disturbing as well as hilarious.  As in most classical farce, pain is funny—and we giggle so as not to cry.”

Corden’s “boyish charm . . . makes his incompetence charming as well as ridiculous” and his “confident bonhomie is particularly evident in the audience participation sequences.”  Sierz also parcels out praise for Rigby’s Alan, Chris’s Stanley, Rooper’s Rachel, Lams’s Pauline, and Toase’s Dolly.

The review-writer proclaimed Hytner’s production “dazzlingly brilliant” and added kudos to associate director Cal McCrystal who staged the clowning “to magnificent effect,” making it “satirical, bawdy and crowd-pleasingly funny.”

Matt Roush, writing for TV Insider, an online newsletter published by NTVB Media (which also puts out TV Guide, among other publications), called One Man, Two Govnors a “side-splitting farce” upon watching the PBS broadcast, and proclaimed Corden “a slapstick virtuoso.”

“Running himself ragged as Francis, . . . Corden dominates the stage with his tireless physical and verbal comedy,” wrote Roush.  “Highbrow it’s not,” the reviewer admitted, “but just try to contain the belly laughs when he’s joined by the miraculous . . . Tom Ed[d]en as a doddering ancient waiter.”

Roush observed, “Though based on a play from the commedia dell’arte era, the rhythms are pure vaudeville, with corny jokes, hammy overacting and campy musical interludes.”

“[I]f you were to ask me . . . what were the two funniest performances I’ve seen over too many years of playgoing,” mused Steven Suskin on New York Stage Review, “I would have an instant answer.  One was given by Phil Silvers, at an underpopulated matinee of the 1972 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“The other,” continued Suskin, “a 2011 performance which nine years and some 400 (?) shows later still sets me laughing as I type this, is that of James Corden in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.”  Suskin first saw the Bean farce in London, but relished the chance to see it again when it was live-streamed.  (He went on to see it twice more in New York.)

“I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that nothing was lost in the [transfer to the screen],” expressed Suskin.  “You did not have that same thrill of live theater, which in the case of One Man included Corden pulling volunteers and watercress sandwiches out of the orchestra seats,” acknowledged the reviewer.  “But the broadcast worked just as well, with the closeups on screen amplifying the power of the physical humor and stoking the overall hilarity.”

Touting the April 2020 broadcast by the National Theatre over the Internet, Suskin advised “those of you with an interest in comedy might do well to watch One Man, Two Guvnors twice or thrice this week.  I mean, what good is sitting alone in your room. . . if you can spend the hours laughing?” 

The NYSR writer is obviously a Fan—with a capital F—of James Corden.  “I won’t even try, at this point, to describe Corden’s performance,” affirmed Suskin.  “He was all over the stage, all over the floor, juggling plates and characters and plotlines with such voraciousness and such relish that you (and the thousand other customers) gave up on decorum and laughed yourself past exhaustion to exhilaration.”

“James Corden might not be a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic,” declared Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune, “but he . . . sure is therapeutic.”  He went on to characterize Corden’s turn in One Man as “so consistently hilarious that you might just fall off your couch and knock out the dog with your tumbling laptop.”

Continuing with his healing theme, Jones added, “They should be piping this glorious thing into hospital wards with the oxygen.  Laughter heals, folks!  And, yes, you can snort and guffaw right into your mask.”

For what Jones dubbed “one of [the National Theatre’s] greatest hits of all time,” Hytner mounted a “rip-roaring production” that “nods not just at Commedia but British pantomime and American vaudeville, with Corden a presence both retro and contemporary.” 

Jones concluded that One Man “might not be the funniest thing you ever saw, but it will be right up there, I promise, and at just the right moment.”

Apparently, at least as far as the NT Live production is concerned, the Aussies just overlooked the jibes at their homeland.  I found two reviews of the streamed performances, and neither one even mentioned the Australia jokes.  (I didn’t examine the reviews of the London production’s tour of Australia or the two or three local productions—it seems that Bean’s reluctance eased later and he allowed Australian companies to stage the play.)

In the Rock City Jester of Canberra, Australia, John Lombard labeled One Man Two Guvnors, “a fizzy farce set in the swinging sixties.”  Characterizing the production as “hilarious,” Lombard reported that Bean “spices the elaborate plot by making the monied patriarchs of the [Commedia] original into genteel mobsters.”

With a “sublime” cast “with irresistible energy, immaculate timing and crafty character observation,” director Hytner, the reviewer affirmed, “tells the story with panache, wisely anchoring the comedy in aching longing.” 

Lombard found, “The sense of time and place is extraordinary, with cockney accents [they’re actually northern English accents], popping primary colour costumes and slight rattiness in set perfectly evoking 60s Brighton.”

The review-writer also felt the skiffle band The Craze “are the cherry on top of the sundae, with their musical interludes adding tremendously to the sense of fun and place.”  Lombard concluded by asserting that the “National Theatre’s One Man Two Guvnors is a banquet of entertainment.”

Nary a mention of the Australian put-downs!

'The Servant of Two Masters' (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012)

I made a short visit to my mother in Washington, D.C., over the summer solstice and while there, we took in two shows. The first was the revival of Carlo Goldoni’s classic commedia-infused Servant of Two Masters by the winner of the 2012 Regional Theatre Tony, the Shakespeare Theatre Company. (The other performance we saw was the National Tour of the hit Broadway musical Memphis at the Kennedy Center. That ROT report will follow this one at the end of the week.) Commedia dell’arte, the 16th- and 17th-century improvised comedy form that sprang up in Italy virtually out of nowhere—it bears some similarity to the low Roman comedies that were popular entertainment in the decades before the end of the empire, but the gap between the end of the Roman period and the early Renaissance is far too wide for the influence to be direct—is silly, ribald—what Jane Horwitz described as “bawdy—not dirty” in the Washingtonian—and physical. The stories are stock and little more than scenarios upon which the actors—there were no directors or playwrights—could hang slapstick hijinks, caricatures of local figures, jokes, clown routines, acrobatics, and social or political satire. Sophisticated they weren’t, but it took immense skill to pull them off (commedia dell’arte can be translated as ‘comedy of skills’) and keep them rolling from gag to gag (known as lazzi), with rudimentary scenery—they toured and performed on wagon stages set up in streets and squares—few props, basic costumes that were usually symbolic of the stock characters which everyone recognized immediately, and masks that covered the top half of the faces of many of the actors and which were also iconic for certain roles. The success of the commedia troupes soon influenced the contemporary theater in France, finding its way into the plays of Molière and his contemporary comic playwrights, and into England, where its remnants can be seen even today in the Punch and Judy puppet shows popular among children all over the country.

By the 18th century, the power of the commedia troupes was waning, and theatrical practice and taste had refined enough to make the bawdy and coarse stage work of commedia dell’arte less acceptable, especially at court or in court-sponsored performances with the dawn of the Enlightenment. On the Italian stage especially, but all over Europe as well, opera was becoming the favored theatrical form (though the comic operas of Mozart and others borrowed heavily from the commedia and its descendants). The improvised commedia fell out of favor, though the slapstick humor—the very term comes from a common prop of the performances, the slap stick—and stock characters like Harlequin (known in Italian as Arlecchino), the crafty servant in his distinctive diamond-patterned costume; Pantalone, the foolish old man; Il Dottore, the quack who spouted indecipherable Latin; Pierrot and Pierrette, the pastoral lovers; and several others—remained popular with audiences. One way to keep the form alive for audiences was for playwrights to take up the style and the characters and craft scripted plays with them. That way the humor and situations could be repeated but under more control than the anarchic stage of commedia permitted. Among the most accomplished and popular dramatists of the 18th-century was Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), easily one of the most prolific writers of the classic or any other period, with over 300 scripts attributed to his authorship. In 1743, Goldoni assembled several commedia characters and situations in his Il servitore di due padroni, revised a decade later (to formalize the comic action, based on the improvisations the actors devised in the 1743 version). It’s been a staple of theater companies both here and in Europe, including a 1947 interpretation by Giorgio Strehler for his Piccolo Teatro di Milano which is still in the troupe’s repertory even 15 years after Strehler’s death (I saw it at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005). The current Broadway hit One Man, Two Guvnors by Richard Bean is also based on Servant.

The STC revival of The Servant of Two Masters is an adaptation by playwright Constance Congdon from a translation by Christina Sibul, first presented by Hartford Stage in 1996, directed by Bartlett Sher (renowned now for Lincoln Center’s South Pacific revival, among other productions). The STC staging was mounted originally at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2010 under the direction of Christopher Bayes, who played Brighella in the Hartford début. (Bayes, an expert in commedia acting, was the head of Physical Acting at the Yale School of Drama in 2010.) My mother and I caught the STC presentation on Wednesday evening, 20 June, at the Lansburgh Theatre in downtown Washington. The Washington performances started on 15 May, opening to the press on 21 May, and closed on 24 June (after two extensions of just over two weeks). The production has played other cities in the U.S. since New Haven and apparently continues to tour with largely the same cast.

In the wrong hands, modern performances of commedia dell’arte can be tedious, exercises in studied acrobatic gags (Peter Marks described it as “calcified frivolity” in the Washington Post) and hoary lazzi dragged up from the days of vaudeville and golden-age TV variety. “Clever” purveyors throw in current political and pop-culture references—because all theater students know that the Renaissance troupes used the performances to comment on local goings-on and topical scandals and gossip. (At STC, for instance, Nancy Pelosi and Rick Santorum came in for passing mentions, along with a questionable reference to Whitney Houston's death.) Unless the performers are especially talented at improvisation and physical comedy—modern-day zanni (the clownish characters like Harlequin and Scapino) such as, say, Bill Irwin or David Shiner (coming next season, happily, to the other STC, New York’s Signature Theater Company)—making the shtick seem organic and spontaneous, the whole proceeding can feel forced and inauthentic, like the acting, if you’ll pardon the comparison, in porn movies. The Piccolo Teatro company is, of course, well-practiced in the arts of their forebears and the stage work on display in Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters was stunning, probably the closest I’ll ever come to a theatrical trip back in time. (I recall that the supertitles at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall were so far away from the performers that I had to choose either to read the dialogue, spoken in Italian, or watch the action. I chose to watch, and even though I didn’t understand any of what the actors said, I could follow the simple plot and all the lazzi with no problem. I think, even if I’d tried to follow the supertitles instead, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my eyes from the stage work—it was too fascinating and engaging.)

Congdon’s adaptation (or Bayes’s version of it) starts in Italian as two stage hands enter a darkened stage. They open a trunk and tiny lights—perhaps fireflies or stardust, but definitely magic—soar upwards into the fly space and float around the stage, courtesy of lighting designer Chuan-Chi Chan. That makes what follows an enchanted play-within-a-play. Under the spell, we’re transported to Venice and the house of Pantalone (Allen Gilmore) whose daughter, Clarice (Danielle Brooks), was to be married to Federigo Rasponi. But Federigo’s reported dead, confirmed by Brighella (Liam Craig), so Pantalone now promises Clarice to Silvio (Andy Grotelueschen), the infantile son of Il Dottore (Don Darryl Rivera), and the engagement’s proclaimed. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door and Smeraldina (Liz Wisan), Pantalone’s servant, ushers in Truffaldino (Steven Epp), announcing that he’s come on behalf of his master to request an audience. His master is, of all people, Federigo—and the wedding is called off. All isn’t what it appears, of course, since "Federigo" is really Beatrice (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), Federigo’s cross-dressing sister. (“She rides horseback!” declared Brighella earlier.) Beatrice has come to find her lover, Florindo (Jesse J. Perez), who’s responsible for her brother’s death and has fled to Venice. Got all that?

Well, wait—’cause you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. The real focus of Servant is Truffaldino, the title character who is a close cousin of Harlequin and essentially behaves like him. Because he’s always hungry, the wily servant agrees impulsively to serve Florindo, who shows up at Brighella’s inn where Federigo/Beatrice is also staying, when his first “master” leaves him too long without a meal. The farce ensues from Truffaldino’s attempts to serve each master without revealing to one that the other exists—along with his continuous attempts to score some vittles. (In the Strehler version, there was a truly hilarious scene where Arlecchino—as Truffaldino was called in that production—serves two completely different dinners to each master in separate dining rooms. This business was only suggested in Congdon’s rendition.) As to which lovers are united and what becomes of Truffaldino, I’ll let you all find out. One hint (no real spoiler, though): This isn’t a tragedy or even a tragicomedy. (The death of Beatrice’s brother at the hand of her lover is pretty much forgotten, except as a plot complication.) Happiness is the goal.

Generally speaking, American actors aren’t heavily trained in physical comedy and commedia style. There are specialty studios and troupes that work in that vein, and some actors are naturally adept at it, but it’s not what we do here very much. Bayes’s cast does an excellent job of performing the lazzi and getting into the world of commedia dell’arte, both in spirit and in body. Bayes didn’t include much acrobatics in his performance text, so I don’t know how skilled the actors are in that arena, but they handled the physical comedy adeptly and the verbal style smoothly. Still, I felt that everyone was trying a little too hard, including Bayes. There weren’t exactly quotation marks around the jokes, but some were pushed forth a bit too earnestly, especially the ones that had obviously been inserted specifically for the Washington audiences (references to Ford’s Theater; snippets of songs from The Music Man, playing at the Arena Stage across town; references to O’Neill’s lo-o-o-ooong Strange Interlude, the previous show at STC earlier in the spring; a joke about congress which included directions to the Capitol, a few blocks from the Lansburgh; and lines about Foggy Bottom and Georgetown, two famous neighborhoods of the Nation’s Capital that are a mile or two above the theater). This kind of jokiness may have started in rehearsals as ad-libs, but in performance they read as practiced and prepared.

Now, while Bayes’s interpretation of Servant was fun and enjoyable, it was very much in the vein of a studied effort. The production was also what Barbara Mackay of the Washington Examiner called “a mixed bag of acting styles and musical styles, a spectacular blurring of the lines between 16th-century Italy and 21st-century America.” She saw that as “its appeal,” and I don’t have a problem with that in theory, but it struck me as carefully selected and approved, not ad-libbed and organic. The actors didn’t look unnatural doing the farce, but the lazzi and the verbal jokes all had the feel of material that had been carefully invented and inserted in the performance text with forethought and deliberation. Commedia was largely improvised and the humor was spontaneous; even when Goldoni formalized the gags, they were still supposed to look as if the actors were making them up as they went along—or, at least, just before they went on stage. I won’t say that Bayes’s cast wasn’t adept with the material, but it didn’t look terribly organic. (In comparison with the Piccolo Teatro staging, it looked downright stiff!) In the case of a face-slap that’s supposed to snowball into a spontaneous, domino-like chain reaction, the routine looked choreographed and set up. Now, of course it has to be set up—we all know that—but it’s not supposed to look like it’s all planned and rehearsed. I can almost picture the Marx Brothers inserting such a routine into one of their movies (I’m way too young to have seen any of their stage shows) and making it look like a crazy accident, even though the Marxes were famous for carefully rehearsing their performances down to the gesture.

At the same time, I guess in order to animate the two-hour-25-minute production (including one intermission), the whole performance was a bit too antic for my taste. I’m not a big fan of clowning (I once reviewed a clown festival and had to admit this up front), so a show that’s mostly geared to showing off clown routines gets old on me fast. I like “real” commedia when it’s done right, but that’s rare generally and even rarer in the U.S.; when clowning is simply substituted for lazzi—whether 17th-century period gags or their modern equivalents—I can get enervated quickly. That’s largely what happened for me at the STC’s Servant of Two Masters. It was well done, but not inspired.

Don’t get the impression, however, that the Yale production was cheap-jack or thrown together. Katherine Akiko Day’s set was rudimentary, but that’s in the style of commedia. The stage for the most part was bare, with a wooden frame in the center for the plain, worn, pale yellow curtain that represented the wagon stage of the 17th century. (Goldoni’s play would have been presented in a conventional theater, of course, and we must remember that this production is set up as a commedia street show inside a proscenium theater.) The action of Servant took place in front of this frame; up stage, behind the curtain, were tiny little set pieces representing the town, the playing area being an evocation of the town square. (STC’s program doesn’t tell us where the play takes place, but Goldoni’s plays are usually set in Venice, his birthplace. It’s really irrelevant, in any case. Commedia characters each had their own places of birth and their dress and accents were part of the iconography that identified them—but we wouldn’t really recognize that in the 21st-century U.S. anyway.) 

Valérie Thérèse Bart’s colorful costumes were both period- and role-specific, with Pantalone’s outfit harking back to the 16th century as it traditionally did while the rest wore 18th-century garb that evoked their status (peasant, servant, wealthy middle class, and so on) and personality (Clarice was frilly and pink, Silvio foppish and childlike). The half-masks worn by some of the zanni (Truffaldino, Pantalone, Il Dottore—only certain roles, known as “masks,” were traditionally masked) looked like representations of the depictions of commedia masks (no actual ones have survived because they were made of perishable leather), but they were all black rather than painted and their use didn’t much enhance the performance. I don’t know how much mask work the cast did in preparation of the show—none is indicated in the program and no one is credited with this technique (though the masks themselves were designed by Renzo Antonello)—but my impression is that the actors weren’t drilled or trained in mask use and the masks were included only as period-accurate costume accessories. (Masked acting is a very special skill which few modern troupes demand. Even Eric Bentley, in the notes to his edition of classic Italian theater, advises modern western casts not to use them. I’ve published an article on the subject on ROT: “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011.)

The two-man musical combo (Chris Curtis and Robertson Witmer), playing several instruments each including accordion, percussion, and fiddle (plus, among other items, a saw played with a violin bow), almost became additional characters in the performance, interacting with the actors with looks and glances from time to time. Their music, which Curtis also composed with Aaron Halva in a gallimaufry of styles, added a soundtrack to the performance that unified the antic frolicking, and the musicians contributed sound effects to the slapstick antics as well. They contributed immensely to the playful atmosphere of the production, just as I assume the 17th-century musicians might have.

Bayes kept everything moving at a fairly frenetic pace, which is in keeping also with the nature of the play. Commedia isn’t a pensive sort of comedy and the verbiage isn’t of the witty variety that requires a moment to contemplate either in the saying or the hearing. Technically, the performance was excellent: well-conceived and –executed all around. The company all did creditable jobs limning their roles, and there were even some amusing and timely twists on the traditional parts. As Florindo, an avatar of Il Capitano, the braggart soldier, Jesse J. Perez became a Spanish (the text was amended to indicate he’s “foreign”) fop, with a long, flowing wig (he takes it off once or twice) to protect his vanity, and a cavalier’s large-brimmed hat (think Three Musketeers or something—he’s even called Puss-’n–Boots once and Captain Morgan—of the rum fame—also gets a mention). He comes off a bit fey, intentionally, I assume, which is balanced by Rachel Spencer Hewitt’s Federigo/Beatrice, who isn’t so much butch as just very straight. (I wonder if Hewitt was channeling Glenn Close from Albert Nobbs.) The young lover, Silvio, who’s usually pretty much a nonentity, is here portrayed by a slightly chubby Andy Grotelueschen is a sort of Baby Huey in short pants (they’re really wide-legged, loosely-bound breeches, but they give the impression of a Little Lord Fauntleroy brat). Grotelueschen often speaks in an almost-whine and comes close to stomping his foot in petulant impatience when he doesn’t get what he wants.

The casting of the old men was perfectly in line with tradition: Pantalone, in the person of Allen Gilmore, was tall and skinny with a bit of a pot belly under his red gown, towering over the short, round Dottore of Don Darryl Rivera (who could double as Danny Devito with a little make-up). Unfortunately, little was made of this paring except the visual when they stood on stage next to one another. Danielle Brooks’s Clarice, Pantalone’s daughter and the fiancée of, first, Silvio and then “Federigo,” was a little too much of a flibbertigibbet (and she shouted too much for my likes), and Liz Wisan as the servant Smeraldina seemed rather colorless in the midst of all the antics going on, hardly a match for Truffaldino, her traditional suitor.

The center of the play is Truffaldino, the title servant who tries to serve two masters. As an avatar of Harlequin, he’s the trickster, the schemer, who’s eternally hungry and always on the look-out for a way to pick up a little extra (mostly food). Steven Epp, who’s been a colleague of Bayes since the 1980s when they both were at Minneapolis’ Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, a now-defunct avant-garde troupe, handled him well enough as far as the quick-wittedness and slapstick is concerned; he was agile enough when it came to performing the lazzi. (Until I read about Epp’s and Bayes’s connection, I didn’t realize that I’d seen some of the director’s work there in 1989.) But there didn’t seem much depth to the work. Okay, I know that commedia isn’t deep comedy—I said so, didn’t I—but I mean in the stage work. It isn’t that Epp wasn’t committed to the work or didn’t put in effort—he did. But it all seemed rote to me, like he’d been doing it all so long—and I guess he had, since Mom and I saw the play near the end of its Washington run, following a month’s run in New Haven two years ago. The upshot was, I’m sorry to report, that Truffaldino just wasn’t very funny. He mirrored the overall presentation as far I was concerned—perfectly competent but resulting in no more than occasional chuckles or obligatory laughs.

The press overall was lauditory. Not a few made allusions to the Three Stooges (not a selling point for me, admittedly), the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, and Abbott and Costello—though I think they were overselling the show. Opening Roll Call’s review by wryly observing, “Washington, D.C., is the perfect backdrop for a commedia dell’arte production, which requires the actors to wear masks, keep their identity fluid and wreak havoc,” Neda Semnani described the STC classic revival as “perfectly, cleverly, wonderfully insane.” “With a comedy as outrageous and fast-paced as this one, the audience—and perhaps even the actors—will never really know what’s going to happen next,” wrote Semnani. “And, in the end, that is the very reason to go.” In the Post, Marks called Bayes’s Servant “deliriously happy-making” and “one of the most gleeful Shakespeare company offerings of the past 10 years.” The director and cast “consistently locate Goldoni’s sweet spot,” he wrote, even as he acknowledged that “it’s in the nature of such carbonated mischief that some of the zaniness veers out of bounds.” In the Washington City Paper, Chris Klimek described the production as a “manic new resuscitation of the 18th century farce” which still had “plenty of amiable excess to enjoy.” Mackay’s Examiner review began with her characterization above, and concluded with an invocation of some of the great comics of a more recent past, saying, “Bayes offers a look into a historical period otherwise unknown to us, and we can understand what commedia audiences may have felt” and Washingtonian magazine’s Horowitz asserted “that Servant “has everything—high hilarity, low comedy, breakneck slapstick, fine singing, a bit of dancing, and a dash of fish juggling” and summed up with “It's simply a riot.” Calling the adaptation “commedia-lite,” however, Kate Wingfield of Metro Weekly warned that “if you like your humor telegraphed, your slapstick shameless and your gags spelled out, yelled and repeated, you will find the proceedings pants-wettingly funny.”

The blogosphere largely agreed with the printed press. Amanda Gunther started out with the observation, “The audience’s laughter was shaking the rafters” in the Lansburgh (though I’m not sure the theater actually has any) in DC Metro Theater Arts, dubbing the production “an uproarious faction of fools.” Gunther especially praised “the way the characters constantly physicalize the textual metaphors they are speaking.” In the end, she reminded her readers that “everything is also enchanted” in the STC Servant. On Maryland Theatre Guide, Elliot Lanes labeled the STC production “a commedia dell’arte lover’s delight,” observing , “The ensemble works beautifully as a whole.” “Director Christopher Bayes and company have done a yeoman’s job of giving us a hilarious evening in the theatre,” Lanes concluded. In his Baltimore Sun blog, Tim Smith called the show “terrifically clever, offering a joy ride of witty dialogue and physical shtick that never runs out of steam.” “I defy you to remember any cares and woes,” he challenged his readers, “while spending a few hours” at the Lansburgh. Taking another tack, Hunter Styles praised the performers in DC Theatre Scene because they “act like children” as “they unbottle their most primal, outsized emotions with such smarts and skill that it’s hard to not flash-back to the days of recess.” “Charmingly vulgar, hugely aerobic, and strewn with nifty low-key tricks,” Styles said, Servant was a “finely tuned and divinely funny” show.

[Since I mentioned the Strehler production of Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters several times in this report, I’ve decided to post the 2005 report on the Piccolo Teatro’s performance at the Lincoln Center Festival for comparison’s sake. Come back to ROT in the coming weeks to see what I said about that production seven years ago and how I thought it differed from Christopher Bayes’s interpretation.]