Review: OH NO IT ISN'T!, Jack Studio Theatre

There’s one part La Cage Aux Folles, one part Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissie and Ada  and one part Steptoe and Son in Luke Adamson’s Christmas show with a difference at the Jack Studio Theatre, a venue that has a long record of taking chances on new plays. They don’t always completely work, as in this case, but praise be that they continue to do so and that the new(ish) wave of artistic directors at some of London’s biggest stages have a look at work there and at the likes of the Finborough Theatre, its cousin in West London.    

We open on two middle-aged actors in drag and full make-up bickering in a shared dressing room at a provincial theatre as Cinderella plays out on stage. Old hands at the game and with a solid track record behind them (perhaps more), Mr Worth, is serious but on the slide, professionally and personally, while the Mr Chancery treats acting as a trade and his personal life as a bit of a lark. Offsetting those real-life verbal barbs, we’re intermittently taken into the theatre’s house for a selection of the Ugly Sisters’ numbers, pastiche panto songs and slapstick that adds a strained jollity to the play.  

Bryan Pilkington captures the bitterness morphing into despair of his washed up thesp with sensitivity, particularly as his mind becomes so turbulent that he loses the single thing that one feels holds his life together - his art. Matthew Parker lends an element of bitchy cruelty to his Mr Chancery, firing off a few laughlines, but we’re never left in doubt that he’s a self-confessed user and is surely using his old panto buddy yet again.

It’s a unusual play, 70 minutes all-through, a rollercoaster in tone, balancing on a tightrope of comedy and tragedy. Reflecting on why it never quite resolved in my mind, I’d suggest that the humour never built the momentum required to get the audience laughing along, but the pathos never landed either (at least until late on), each mood opposing the other too frequently for either to become established.

Often when plays don’t achieve all that they might, reviewers claim that there’s a better, shorter, more focused play within the one witnessed, ‘less is more’ so often the case on stage. Rarely does the reverse present itself, but I suspect that is so in this instance. Perhaps we need a little more warmth, a little more backstory and a little more indication of things going right for us to feel the full impact of the pain of things going wrong - a more defined Act one to enhance the Acts two and three that we see. 

Oh No It Isn't! at the Jack Studio Theatre until 6 January

Photo Credits: Davor @The Ocular Creative

     

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