6/10

By Georges Feydeau

Directed by Michael Friend

Venue: Mill Studio

Date: Friday 27th February 2009

This evening’s entertainment comprised two one-act plays by Georges Feydeau.  The first was titled An Interesting Condition, and started with a husband and his very pregnant wife marching up and down the dining room carpet making noises – all the variations on “ooh” and “aah” you can think of. She’s suffering all sorts of agony as the baby is apparently due that day, although it’s one month early. The husband is just trying to have a little dinner, but somehow that simple desire brands him as a selfish bastard who doesn’t care a jot for his wife, despite getting her into this condition. Good job she’s not the complaining sort!

Her mother arrives and soon takes her daughter’s side. Between them, they manage to get the husband to put a chamber pot (unused) on his head (it was a dream the wife had had). The wife retires to her room.

Then the midwife arrives and starts bossing everyone around, demanding food (there’s only macaroni cheese) and wine (she settles for champagne). The wife’s father also arrives, annoyed at being dragged away from a game of cards at his club, and the exasperation of all parties mounts until finally the midwife announces that it’s all been a lot of fuss over nothing. The wife has had a phantom pregnancy. Aspersions about the husband being too useless to get his wife pregnant lead to references about his chamber-pot-wearing predilections, and the lights go out just after the husband has put the chamber pot on the father’s head so we miss out on the final punch up. But we can tell it’s going to be fun.

This was quite a funny one act play, though if we judged by the mortuary audience they had in tonight you wouldn’t have known it. The couple behind us spent the early stages scraping ice cream tubs and squeezing coffee cups, another woman leapt about a bit before settling down (she was in the front row, so it was a bit distracting) and the audience in general seemed indisposed to laugh. I thought the performances were all good and I would have rated this experience higher if the atmosphere had been more conducive to merriment.

The second piece was called Going to Pot. Another husband and wife have a number of altercations, mainly about the wilful refusal of their daughter, Toto, to take a laxative. She’s been constipated for, ooh at least three hours, so it’s obviously a major concern. All this while the husband is trying to convince an official from the Department of Defence to buy umpteen thousand chamber pots, soldiers, for the use of, which he believes will make him a fortune. One slight drawback is the tendency of the ceramic pots to smash when thrown on a solid floor. The other drawback is the presence of the wife, still en déshabillé, and the rebellious daughter, who contrives to get both the official and her father to drink the unwanted laxative while she munches on the sweeties.

It’s very funny, especially when the idea of the husband wearing a chamber pot on his head is briefly mooted, a nice echo of the earlier piece. It starts with the husband not able to find ‘les Zebrides’ in the encyclopaedia, under ‘Z’. It took me a few moments, but then I realised he was looking for the Hebrides. His wife comes in and corrects him pretty quickly, telling him he won’t find them under ‘Z’. He has to look under ‘E’. For ‘les Ebrides’. More laughter. The audience had finally warmed up, relocated, and shut up too, so this half was much more enjoyable than the first.

At long last the wife finds the entry under ‘H’, where the husband had sarcastically suggested she look. Cue an argument about whose idea it was to look there. And this was just the warm up. As the battle over the laxative heats up, the wife becomes ever more crazed, eventually forcing the official to drink a dose to show their daughter that it’s OK. He has a nervous stomach so it doesn’t do him much good. When the official’s wife and her male cousin turn up, the wife rashly informs the official that he’s a cuckold, as the closeness between the two cousins has been common gossip for some time and the rumour mill has done its worst. With that threesome storming off, the husband dashing to the loo (he took a glass of fruit salts by mistake) the daughter can pretend to her mother that she actually drank off the glass of laxative, and the play closes with mother and daughter in a fond embrace, happy at last.

Again, we liked all the performances, with Keith Myers, who played the husband both times, and Raymond Daniel-Davies (father-in-law and official) just nosing in front of a very good field. The set was straightforward, though tight for space, and the costumes were all fine. Even with the lukewarm audience response, this was still a good evening out.

© 2009 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me