In a bar near The Old Vic a Theatre Buff is chatting to his friend, an ageing and slightly conservative Dramaturg for a touring theatre company.

D: Madame Bovary, a play you say?

TB: That’s right.

D: Not possible.  She’s a wonderful literary creation I’ll grant you, but it’s all internal, her thoughts and emotions, she hardly says a word.

TB: I tell you they’ve done it.

D: (Scoffing) How pray?

TB: Rat catchers!

D: (Looking round) Where?

TB: No, in the play.

D: (With an exasperated sigh) There are no rat catchers in the book.  You must have been watching something else.

TB: Don’t be ridiculous, I know what I’ve seen.  They come on at the beginning and tell everybody how it’s going to end.

D: (With mounting scorn) Oh, brilliant!

TB: Actually they don’t.

D: Ah.

TB: They come on, on a kind of coach made from a box and a rocking horse cut in two with each half at opposite ends of the box.

D: Sounds amateurish.

TB: It was great, we all hooted. Then they changed the ending.  They bought all the arsenic from the chemist so she couldn’t poison herself.

D: (Contemptuously smug) So not actually, Madame Bovary.

TB: Well yes, because in the end Madame Bovary gets them to change their mind and do it as per., but they’d originally wanted a happy ending with her going to Paris and having her dreams fulfilled so they could have a big finale with Can Can girls and some Marcel Marceau mime – you know, in a glass box and so on, and with a big panorama of the Eiffel Tower…

D: Stop!

TB: All of which they actually did get to do at the end.

D: (Aghast) You are describing a literary travesty.

TB: No, no, it was brilliant!  Pure theatre. I had face-ache by the end.

D: Are you telling me it was done as a comedy? No don’t answer that, it’s painfully obvious from what you’ve said already.

TB: Well yes and no.  There were only four of them; Emma Fielding who plays Madame B, John Nicholson, her doting dolt of a hubby, some Spanish bloke, Javier Mahzan, who gets to do all the suave seducer parts…

D: Typical.

TB: As well as one of the rat catchers… oh and Madame Bovary who struts off in a huff at one point – Ms. Fielding didn’t like the way her character was being developed – so he steps into the breach.  Then there was this other chap, Jonathan Holmes, who rushed around like a lunatic playing everyone else in the town, including the poor bloke who gets his leg cut off.  But there was pathos, and bathos, and importantly Madame B. gets to talk and tell us about the life-draining boredom of provincial life and the crushing constraints of being a woman in an unequal society.

D: Well I suppose Monsieur Flaubert would approve of that.  And he did like a pop at the narrow-minded, conservative and unimaginative aspirations of the bourgeois so the comedy may well have met with his approval.

TB: They were all fantastic; Ms Fielding was peart and intelligent, sensuous like a sexual volcano – they did the sex scene… hang on, no it wasn’t a sex scene, she didn’t like the term, thought it demeaning or something, anyway the scene where her lover gets his leg over for the first time, that scene whatever it was, they did it twice.  It got a round the second time.

D: Hold on. This performance was in the Old Vic and not the pub?

TB: Of course. I did notice the bar doing some brisk business though, during the interval. It was just all very funny; the script was funny, the props were funny even the set was funny.

D: (Helpfully) The lighting?

TB: Well..

D: I’m teasing. I wonder if Mr. West is in town yet, I’m so looking forward to his Lear.

TB: That’s not ‘till June. Really you ought to go. It’ll remind you of what theatre can do, like that company you like, Kneehigh and Ms Cookson – in fact it’s the Old Vic doing what it does best, championing creativity and innovation.

D: (Getting up to go) Anyone would think you worked for them.

TB: I just like to give credit where it’s due.

D: Don’t we all, don’t we all? (He finishes his gin and tonic and leaves)

★★★★★     Graham Wyles     28^th April 2016