Review: HARLEQUINADE / ALL ON HER OWN, GarrickTheatre, November 7 2015

What fun everyone has with Terence Rattigan's Harlequinade (at the Garrick Theatre until 13 January), a pantomime-like farce, without all the baggage panto brings with it.

Sir Kenneth Branagh plays Arthur Gosport, an ageing actor whose company is taking Romeo and Juliet around England's more provincial towns in a typically paternalistic government initiative designed to entertain and edify a population still recovering from the effects of World War II. (The show is preceded by a lovely black and white newsreel about CEMA - The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts - the wartime precursor for the Arts Council of today.)

Gosport is highly strung, rude and, well, everything you want from an actor-impresario played for laughs (and Sir Ken is an excellent comedian) - Rattigan must have been pleased that Johnny Gielgud had the good grace not to sue. Mrs (or is she?) Gosport is just as broadly drawn - though that's half the fun of course - Miranda Raison excellent as the pair cling to each other's talents and faults, long since reconciled to both after years on the road.

There's good work from Tom Bateman as the Stage Manager and the only sane person in the whole company, a man whose addiction to theatre even overwhelms his love for his exasperated fiancee, Joyce, a well-judged performance from Kathryn Wilder. Despite all that, the show is stolen effortlessly by Zoe Wanamaker's turn as Dame Maud, the lush who just can't resist giving one more piece of advice from her days playing Juliet in 1914.

None of this pushes back the boundaries of stage comedy and it doesn't have much to say about the state of the nation in 2015, but it's all so easy to like and so easy to laugh at that it puts a real spring in your step as the long nights draw on. Good, slightly old-fashioned, entertainment.

In a twenty minutes or so opener, Zoe Wanamaker delivers a Rattigan monologue that could easily have been one of Alan Bennett's celebrated "Talking Heads" shows from the 80s.

Rosemary Hodge is alone with the whisky decanter in her comfortable Hampstead house when her dead husband starts to talk inside her head. We learn of a woman who may have been disappointed in her marriage and in the ennui that middle-aged, middle class life brings on, but finds life without her husband worse, the loneliness almost tangible now. When she starts to question whether the coroner was right to bring in a verdict of accidental death on the fateful night she rowed with her husband, or whether he had rather more intention with the booze and pills, she starts to spiral towards actions she may live to regret - if she's lucky.

Wanamaker simply demands our attention, moving from armchair to sofa as she winds herself up with slug after slug from the glass, but her most powerful weapon to compel our attention is that voice. Young actors and actresses could learn much from the clarity of her diction and how she uses pitch to create a sense of intimacy in a large theatre - a master at work.