Keep an eye out for one Kenneth Branagh, he’s going to have quite a career. He’s currently playing Romeo at the Garrick Theatre and is amusing from the start of Act One Scene One when, on an aspirational Italianate set, he and Miranda Raison begin the famous balcony scene. What what? I hear you say, Starting with the balcony scene? That’s quite a re-edit of the play isn’t it?
Of course that isn’t the first scene of Romeo and Juliet, but it is the first scene of Harlequinade, Terence Rattigan’s farce about a theatre company putting on Romeo and Juliet in a provincial theatre. Branagh is playing leading actor Arthur Gosport who is playing Romeo Montague. He’s worried he might be too old for the part. Events conspire to prove that is just the case.
Humour often doesn’t survive the years, (for evidence see the current exhibition of Georgian cartoons at the Queens Gallery which don’t raise as much as a snigger amongst the viewers). But Harlequinade is still packed with laughs. The direction helps a lot (it’s by Rob Ashford and that Branagh fellow again), but the script has aged very well. There is only one line – about national insurance – that was received in silence in 2015 and yet was probably amusing when first written in 1948.
Much of the play is based on Rattigan’s own experiences acting in Oxford in an R&J production directed by John Gielgud. Amongst various humorous sub-plots he has well described the difficulty of dealing with self-obsessed people who can’t hear anything without relating it directly to themselves and are only able to interpret events by how they impinge on them.
Branagh himself can reduce an audience to laughter by a duelling technique or the manner in which he leaps on a bench, whilst Stuart Neal adds more moments of hilarity with his camp sword-fighting across the stage. One running gag about the way to intonate ‘Faith, we may put up our pipes and be gone’ is directly taken from Rattigan’s own inability to say the line without the Oxford audience laughing. Here the laughter after every attempt is deliberate.
A comedy that is actually funny is sadly a rare thing, so Harlequinade is highly recommended. This is especially the case as it is only one part of a double bill. The first play is All on her Own, a later Rattigan piece, written when he had fallen from critical favour. Zoe Wannamaker (who has a small though amusing role in Harlequinade) plays a widow trying to come to terms with loneliness and guilt after her husband’s death. It’s a short but effective look at something that will affect 50% of every couple and she imbues the monologue with much pathos.
The two plays are completely different and sound a strange combination for an evening’s entertainment. But together they show that the same pen can create a serious meditation on the effects of death and a comedy with hilarious moments. There’s probably something there to learn about pigeon-holing.
Recommended
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