Review: A FLEA IN HER EAR, Tabard Theatre, March 31 2016

"It turned into a complete farce..." is sometimes said about a disaster, an unexpectedly calamitous venture, a failure. And that is how farce is presented to us, the audience, and has been for years. Of course, to be as hapless as that on stage, night after night, hitting marks and timing jokes, requires a great deal of skill, planning and no small amount of luck, as the discipline demanded to be chaotic is paradoxically extremely high.

So it's a brave company that takes on a farce as traditional as Feydeau's A Flea In Her Ear (at the Tabard Theatre until 23 April) with barely enough space to slam a door, flash some cleavage or drop one's trousers. Brave too in staking all on making people laugh. (There's not much of a story and the characters are not developed sufficiently for us to care about them - consequently, if we're not laughing, we're not really doing anything.) So, does it work?

I'd say, with a qualification for the second act that could do with a 10-minute cut, yes, but there are times, as with panto, that one has to take a deep breath and grant the form its conventions.

In Sacha Bush's new translation, we're in Paris (very much "in Paris" as an amusing montage of Parisian cliches opens the show) where wives test their husbands' fidelity, rich men are mistaken for drunk men and a bellboy is regularly given the full "Manuel at Fawlty Towers" treatment by his psychopathic hotel manager. The six strong cast play a dizzying array of roles, all of whom getting laughs in their own right. Jamie Birkett is very funny as a doctor who attempts, and fails, to bring some sort of normality to affairs with a Clouseau-like innocent incompetence; Clark James has a licence to overact, and he uses every inch of it in roles Spanish and English; and Richard Watkins channels enough of John Cleese to play the part, but not so much as to be sued!

Perhaps the show will get tighter later in the run (and nobody will complain if they're released from their tiny seats a little earlier than expected) and that would benefit a show that succeeds on its terms, but might work better if it were cut a little and slowed down a touch too. God knows, it could be a little less frenetic and still be completely madcap!

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