3 October – 15 November
It does the soul of a reviewer good to come across an adaption of a classic fit for modern ears and tastes that is neither slavish to the original play or novel, having little relevance other than modern dress, nor so outlandish as to miss the mark entirely. Adapting Brandon Thomas’s Victorian era play to modern tastes and adding a moral dimension is no mean feat and Rob Madge pulls a blinder.
The ‘boys’, Jack and Charley, a couple of Oxford undergrads, keen to a fault but spiked by the Victorian niceties that require the objects of their affection to be chaperoned at all times, are stumped for a means of getting their girls alone in order to exchange their tokens of love. Amy (Mae Munuo) who is in love with Charley, is about to be dragged off by her unsympathetic uncle, Spettigue (Richard Earl). Kitty (Yasemin Özdemir) is in love with Jack and also desperate for time alone with him. Help is at hand with the imminent arrival of Donna Lucia, Charley’s aunt, recently returned from Brazil.
In a clever adjustment to the original, Madge has given the women agency and unlike the simpering females of Victorian taste his two are quite capable of coming up with a wheeze of their own and it is their idea to have the boys’ chum (Lord Fancourt Babberly) ‘Babbs’ dress as Donna Lucia when the real aunt fails to arrive. Babbs, after a little persuasion, takes to the role with relish and in a nice addition to the plot, discovering something about himself in the process.
Babbs (Max Gill) finds himself in service to Spettigue having given his fortune away to rescue a young man to whom he lost his heart and subsequently all contact. The cross-dressing of Babbs opens the way to a more sympathetic understanding of the character who comes to terms with his own gender fluidity during his little deceit as Donna Lucia.
The play steps up a farcical gear with the arrival of the real aunt (Maggie Service) with her companion Eli (Elijah Ferreira) who it emerges is the long lost love of Babbs. The director, Sophie Drake, has a firm grasp of the kind of play she is dealing with and shows relish with the tropes and devices of farce: quick thinking in a fix, mistaken identity, mistaken knowledge, double entendres and so on. The play is served by an excellent cast who all gallop about with brio. And there is nothing timid about the anachronisms and swearing all of which add to the spirit of fun. Everything ends happily for all but Spettigue who, having been taken in by Babbs, stomps off Malvolio-like leaving the conventional Victorian view of depravity nailed firmly into the coffin of the past for it is only he who fails to accept Babbs for what he is.
The production has everything you could want from an updated classic with a twist.
★★★★★ Graham Wyles 9 October 2025
Photographers credit @ Mark Senior
