{"id":4239,"date":"2014-11-11T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T08:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4239"},"modified":"2016-02-05T19:23:16","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:23:16","slug":"jeeves-and-wooster-in-perfect-nonsense-the-lowry-reviewed-by-peter-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4239","title":{"rendered":"Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense<\/em>, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, \u00a0The Lowry, November 4-8 2014<\/p>\n

What-ho! Welcome to this review of Perfect Nonsense<\/em>, a play(full!) adaptation of PG Wodehouse\u2019s third Jeeves and Wooster novel, The Code of the Woosters<\/em>, that draws attention to itself as a manufactured entertainment for a large audience as seriously as anything Bertolt Brecht ever tried his hand at (but there the seriousness ends \u2013 pip!pip!).<\/p>\n

The feature opens on a bare stage, with James Lance \u2013 an actor familiar to all from the likes of I\u2019m Alan Partridge<\/em>, Smack the Pony<\/em>, Ab Fab<\/em>, Black Mirror<\/em> and quite literally fizzing loads of other things \u2013 in full Bertie Wooster mode, introducing proceedings by letting us know he\u2019s hired the place and invited us all in to recreate some recent goings-on in his life. He treats us to a preposterous bit of back and forth in which he does the voices of himself, Bertie Wooster, and his man servant, Wooster (whose first name, if you\u2019re interested, is Reginald, despite not being revealed in the novels for a whopping great 56 years) \u2013 and then realises that he can\u2019t do the show alone and invites Wooster on stage for us all to see.<\/p>\n

Now, Jeeves is supposed to be played by John Gordon Sinclair (for whom we\u2019ve always retained a soft spot since Gregory\u2019s Girl <\/i>all those years ago \u2013 ah, the times we\u2019ve shouted \u2018Go do something your own age, like vandalise a phonebox\u2019 at passing tramps) \u2013 only John Gordon Sinclair only went and did his back in. So we have Math Sams, understudy, stepping up to fill in. Now, if you\u2019re a John Gordon Sinclair fan (as we are!), you might think: what a jolly old stinker! I expect that ruined the play before it bally well started eh, old chum? But actually it wasn\u2019t long before we were so swept up in the old action that John Gordon Sinclair himself could have come along and tapped us on the shoulder saying, I say, I\u2019m John Gordon Sinclair don\u2019t you know!<\/i> \u2013 and we would have shushed him with a DO YOU MIND?<\/p>\n

There they are, Jeeves and Wooster, setting the scene, figuratively and literally, with Bertie bringing us up to speed with what we need to know and Jeeves, off stage, hammering and sawing in order to create a fireplace, and then a porch door, and then a revolving stage set powered by a bicycle and gradually we find ourselves immersed in the action, moving from Bertie\u2019s front room to a jeweller\u2019s shop to his friend Gussie Finknottle\u2019s house, caught up in a narrative as twisty and turny as a twisty-turny thing (to paraphrase Baldrick). But we get ahead of ourselves because Perfect Nonsense<\/em> isn\u2019t a two man show \u2013 it\u2019s a three man show and that third man is Robert Goodale (one of the two brothers who adapted the novel for the stage) who plays a manservant buddy of Jeeves known as Seppings. Seppings is brought on because he has a particular talent for doing other people \u2013 and so it isn\u2019t long before Seppings is dressing up, as Bertie\u2019s beloved Aunt Dahlia, as Roderick Spode, a sort of Hitlerian bully who grows in height as the play proceeds and ends up adorned in nine feet leather coats, propelled about the stage on a wheeled stool, among others.<\/p>\n

Perfect Nonsense<\/i> has quite the cast of characters, though, and Seppings can\u2019t do everything and so Jeeves is forced to slip in and out of different characters too \u2013 delivering Gussie Finknottle as if he was a shortsighted Eric Morecambe, and Gussie\u2019s love interest (or should that be love disinterest?) Madeline Bassett \u2013 as well as Madeline\u2019s father Sir Watkyn, who hates Gussie and Wooster and the whole blooming set. And just as we\u2019ve seen the stage set put together as part of the entertainment, so each of the characters are given to stepping out of character when the moment calls for it (Bertie commending Jeeves and Seppings at various points in the play when they\u2019ve done a particularly good job recreating a certain part of the action). There are also some delicious moments, such as when, for example, Gussie is hiding under the bed and Jeeves comes in the door \u2013 and Bertie looks out at us, the audience, Laurel and Hardy-like, to incredulously hold the threads of the narrative together even as we sense he slaps Jeeves on the back for doing such a good job.<\/p>\n

What about the plot, though, you might be asking if you managed to read as far as this? Well, in all truth, it\u2019s ‘blink and you\u2019ll lose all sense of what\u2019s going on’ (there\u2019s an antique cow creamer, various people who want it, odd bits of blackmail, treacherous plots, stolen police helmets, slapstick, farce, people falling out of windows, the kind of comedy that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in Mr Magoo \u2013 and the kind of comedy that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in Monty Python for that matter). But keeping up isn\u2019t really all it\u2019s cracked up to be \u2013 what! In fact, the point may come when you don\u2019t keep up (an elderly gentlemen next to us in the audience fell asleep and snored mightily through much of the first half before retiring to the bar for the second half) \u2013 but we think you won\u2019t mind all that much. Not for nothing did the adaptation bag a prestigious Lawrence Olivier award for Best New Comedy, which when you consider that it was first written almost a 100 years ago, is quite a feat.
\n 
\nPeter Wild<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, \u00a0The Lowry, November 4-8 2014 What-ho! 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