Review: Too Clever By Half at Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre

Apologies, Tortoise Soup fans, for the lack of recent updates. I have been run off my feet thanks to the outstanding success of my thriller novel ‘The Girl On The Bus’ – now in its seventh week in the Amazon UK top 100 bestsellers! It has been an incredible journey and in my next blog I will tell you how I did it and what it’s like being a bestselling writer.

Today, however, I feel compelled to tell you about a play that I saw at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre – ‘Too Clever By Half’ by the Russian playwright Alexandr Ostrovsky. I had a free a pair of free tickets for this show (thanks to Clare at the Royal Exchange) but even if I had paid I would have come away with a smile stretched across my face.

This is a little known play by a little known playwright but don’t let that put you off. When we think of Russian playwrights we think, of course, of Chekhov and then of Gogol and Pushkin but in his homeland Ostrovsky is equally as famous. Hopefully this production will go some way to enhancing his reputation in the UK.

Too Clever By Half is a comedy that was written in 1868. The producers have updated this setting to the 1960s and this doesn’t detract one bit – in fact it gives us a chance to hear some wonderful 60s sounds from the likes of Small Faces and The Rolling Stones.

Don’t expect a standard Victorian era comedy here. Ostrovsky injects a large dollop of the absurd and the whole seems to be indebted to English restoration comedies. This is no bad thing at all. People climb out of tiger skins and giant stuffed bears. Lovers transform into horses before our eyes, complete with fences to gallop over.

The whole thing is done with such speed and precision that is impossible not to get carried along by the wit and passion. It is uproariously funny in parts, especially in some of the physical theatre brought to a climax in the scene where Nick Haverson (as a short sighted Kroutistsky) rolls on the floor with a tiger skin rug under the impression that he is being attacked by a dog.

The play is timeless in that it could have been set yesterday or a thousand years ago. It deals with an old story: ambitious young man will stop at nothing to advance himself socially, tricking all around him on his way up the ladder. Ostrovsky, and the wonderful young cast, elevate this premise into a truly wonderful theatrical experience. This is possibly the funniest evening I have ever had in a theatre. The incredible love scene at the end of the first half has to be seen to be believed but i won’t spoil the surprise for you!

Particular praise must go to Dyfan Dwyfor in the lead role of Gloumov. This is a scheming, spiteful young man who thinks nothing of betraying the people who love him. Despite this, thanks to Dwyfor, we in the audience cannot help warming to him and as the denouement approaches we find ourselves rooting for him against our will.

Well done yet again to the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. At a time when many playhouses are playing it as safe as houses, they are not afraid to take artistic chances. This has paid off in spades, and this exhilarating, fantastically absurd and riotously funny play gets a five tortoise shell rating from me! The play runs until 17th August and I heartily recommend this as a summertime treat.

The Mighty Bawd!

Today the world famous Tortoise Soup blog will be reviewing ‘The Country Wife’, currently playing at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.

The Country Wife was written in 1675 by William Wycherley and is one of the most famous of the ‘Restoration Comedies’. Restoration comedies date from the 1660s and 1670s, a period when the monarchy was restored under the new king Charles II. The theatres had been closed by the killjoy puritan government of Cromwell, but one of the first things that Charles did was to re-open the theatres. Playwrights such as Wycherley and Congreve revelled in their new freedoms and created complex and satirical farces that took the word ‘bawdy’ to new levels.

So lewd and lascivious, so openly revelling in sex and scandal, was The Country Wife that it went unperformed for nearly two hundred years. It was revived during the party loving 1920s from which date it has rightly been recognised as a classic of British theatre. The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester is a perfect location to stage Wycherley’s place. It is a beautiful, imposing theatre: traditionally victorian on the outside, yet relentlessly modern inside. Craft shops and a sumptious bar provide the perfect pre-theatre atmosphere before the audience enter the theatre in the round.

So, what did Tortoise Soup think of the play itself? I was very impressed that the Royal Exchange have been faithful to the original script. It is so easy to modernise restoration comedy, especially in this age of political and sexual scandal. This production stuck bravely to its guns, and both costume and design were firmly Seventeenth Century. This added greatly to my enjoyment of the play.

The cast were uniformly superb. Felix Scott was masterful in the lead role of Horner, the man who pretends to be castrated so that he can sleep with as many women as possible. Oliver Gomm was wonderfully energetic as the clown like Mr Sparkish and Amy Morgan was delightful in every way as the titular character Margery Pinchwife. By turns simplistic and scheming, she brought more than a touch of Joanna Page to the role and it was easy to see how she would enchant a man such as Horner.

Of course, it matters little how good the actors are if the writing is below par, but we need have no concerns on that ground: restoration comedies are fantastic entertainment and The Country Wife is at the very pinnacle of the genre. There is more bawdiness and bed hopping in two hours of this play than you would get in two years of Desperate Housewives. The denouement is frenetic and brilliant. The play is jam packed full of wit and if you don’t laugh uproariously at this production then there is no hope for you.

The language of the play is, of course, very much of its time. If taken at face value the use of many of the terms would be seen as shocking and brutal, there were audible gasps as one character threatened to carve the word ‘whore’ onto his wife’s forehead. The views on women are completely at odds with how we think now: for example a woman is compared unfavourably to a spaniel. It is important to recognise however that the words, like everything else in the play, should not be taken at face value – women and men are both the targets of Wycherley’s satire and both sexes are as scheming as the other.

Overall then, I have no hesitation in awarding The Country Wife at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre a prestigious Five Tortoise Shells! I had a fantastic evening from beginning to end and I recommend both the play and the theatre to all.
Please comment below, and tell me about any theatrical gems that you have seen recently!