Reviewer: Gail Sjogren
ENJOY SOME SIDE-SPLITTING LAUGHS.
Are you feeling the strain of the Christmas rush?
Want a laugh and a night out to recharge your batteries?
Then I suggest the, Ballarat National Theatre’s production of See How They Run! could provide just what you need
The play has been described as the funniest in the English language, and is currently enjoying a smash hit revival in London's West –End.
Ballarat's production is directed and designed. by Julian Oldfield, who brings to it his wide experience in English theatre.
See How They Run! is set in wartime England in the lounge room of the vicarage of Merton- cum-Middlewick.
With a quartet of vicars (not all of them what they seem and one at least in his underwear), an inebriated spinster parishioner, a bemused bishop, a dastardly German escapee, a knowing maid and a daring vicar's wife, this farce is a melee of confusion, misunderstanding and a number of ever more ridiculous chases.
The cast maintain the Pace (and their English accents) with split-second timing that rarely falters.
It is hard to single out particular actors in so well-balanced a cast. Katrina Hill is wonderful as the maid who tries desperately to keep the confused vicars, both genuine and Pseudo, apart.
Jill Dunne is the uptight Miss Skillon whose self-righteousness diminishes as her inebriation progresses.
Then there is Lesley Hale, the charming, feisty and increasingly desperate vicar's wife who was - shock horror - an actress before her marriage, and her well-meaning, if rather confused husband, the vicar, played by Brendon Clarke.
The trouble begins with the arrival of her one-time co-star (Andrew Seeary), now a soldier serving at the nearby prisoner-of-war camp but still, as theatrical as ever, shortly followed by her uncle, the bishop (Haydn Vincent), an escaped German prisoner John Daykin), yet another vicar (Michael Zala) and finally Fred Fargher as a bombastic sergeant searching for the escapee.
As the characters are bundled into cupboards and rush in and out of the garden, the pace is hectic and the laughs keep coming. And which vicar spends quite some time in a fetching set of long underwear? Only by going along will you find out the answer!
