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Jack Absolute Flies Again, review: Light-hearted levity, rather than world-conquering phenomenon

Jack Absolute Flies Again at the National Theatre - Brinkhoff-Moegenburg
Jack Absolute Flies Again at the National Theatre - Brinkhoff-Moegenburg

Could theatre’s lucky lightning possibly strike twice? The National was certainly crossing its fingers and hoping so in the case of this long-awaited new play, which was scheduled to open in April 2020 until Covid had other ideas.

Its author, working this time in collaboration with actor Oliver Chris, is Richard Bean, the mastermind comedy creator of One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), which took Goldoni’s creaky 18th century commedia dell’arte The Servant of Two Masters and spun it into box office gold by reworking it as a sophisticated farce set in 1960s Brighton. The play made the names of Bean and lead actor James Corden, as well as a lot of money for its originating theatre. One reviewer even went so far as to call it ‘one of the funniest productions in the National’s history’.

So, no pressure at all on Chris and Bean for this fresh spin on Sheridan’s 1775 repertoire staple The Rivals, which relocates Mrs Malaprop and friends to an RAF station in the Battle of Britain.

The result is a qualified triumph of an evening, one that pitches from the heights of comic delight – ‘‘What’s going to happen in England after we’ve won this war?’ ‘Bunting. Bunting everywhere’’ – to the lows of relentless and tiresome nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

The script has a self-consciously Boy’s Own ‘whizzo’ feel and drips with arch knowingness and nods to its own theatricality, which is amusing enough but prevents us from caring much about what happens to anyone.

As if aware of the superficial frivolity of their confection, which at times runs the risk of rendering the wartime setting almost irrelevant, Bean and Chris swerve into an unexpected and heartfelt ending, which sounds as though it has come from a very different type of war narrative.

Jack Absolute (Laurie Davidson) is now a dashing young RAF officer and Lydia Languish (Natalie Simpson), with whom he had a brief peacetime dalliance, is also a pilot, in the Air Transport Auxiliary. His father Sir Anthony (Peter Forbes) and her aunt Mrs Malaprop (Caroline Quentin) want a marriage-merger of the two families’ considerable wealth, but the young couple are determined to do things their own way.

Newly ‘emancipated’ Lydia has made an ostentatious decision to be on the side of the working class and has thus determinedly fallen in love with fitter Dudley Scunthorpe (‘Tell me tales of what it’s like to be poor in the north’). Her impatient maid Lucy (Kerry Howard, excellent), wiser than all the other characters-cum-caricatures in Emily Burns’s try-hard production put together, is having none of it.

The most memorable figure in The Rivals has always been Mrs Malaprop, she of the word-mangling tendencies, and Quentin, who gives a broad and confident performance, starts strongly by informing us that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godalming’.

The malapropisms come thick and fast and we soon find ourselves begging for mercy and wishing that the writers would dole them out a little more sparingly.

Bean and Chris take sly scattergun potshots at a range of current day issues while sending up the strict social stratification of the 1940s, as well as the mistrust of ‘foreigners’ and the belief that an Englishman is always superior. The trouble is that they run out of ideas and instead start to run on empty, like planes circling in the air in frustration instead of swooping in for a clean landing.

Forbes makes Sir Anthony an amusingly blustering army chap straight out of central casting and he and Quentin engage in a series of antics that would not be out of place on a Donald McGill saucy seaside postcard. Helena Wilson has fun as a liberated-cum-happily-domesticated WAAF member.

Light-hearted levity, then, rather than a world-conquering phenomenon.

Until Sept 3 (020 3989 5455, nationaltheatre.org.uk)