Nicholas Hytner (2011)
At the end of this ‘NT Encore’ screening at the Curzon Richmond, a woman in a seat nearby enthused, ‘I’d love to see it live’. I really enjoyed One Man, Two Guvnors but not least because I was in the relative safety of a cinema. Sally saw and liked Danny Boyle’s National Theatre version of Frankenstein in a similar slot at the Filmhouse earlier this year but I still wasn’t sure beforehand who NT Encore was aimed at. There must be theatre buffs (I don’t mind using that word so much when ‘film’ doesn’t precede it) for whom just being in a cinema is infra dig. There are people like me who think it’s verging on sacrilegious to use the premises to put an undisguised play on screen. In fact, One Man, Two Guvnors is the best of both worlds. It’s evidently an outstanding piece of comedy theatre and you come out grateful that James Corden’s performance in the lead has been recorded. What’s more, you don’t have to join in. Whoever did the camerawork has done a judicious job. There are occasional frustrations: when Corden’s Francis Henshall has a fight with himself I wanted to see what the theatre audience saw, instead of the cross-cutting between Francis’s antagonistic halves. Yet there’s an advantage too in seeing the stage action often in close-up on the screen: observing how the actors create their effects gets to be rather fascinating, whereas beholding art that doesn’t conceal artifice always seems to me a letdown from theatre stalls. The whole thing is hugely entertaining, even though you feel at times that you’re watching a singular (and absorbing) sort of documentary about the staging of a play.
One Man, Two Guvnors is an adaptation, by Richard Bean, of Carlo Goldoni’s 1743 commedia dell’ arte play The Servant of Two Masters – transplanted to Brighton and set in 1963. I’m sure the whole thing is much better for the updating. I’d bet that in an NT production of the original the director would encourage the cast to insert clumsy details to ensure the audience found the humour sufficiently ‘modern’: there’s no need to do that here. The opening scene takes some time to get going. For at least the first ten minutes, I thought it was going to be murder – trapped in the theatre in a cinema. But things change pretty well as soon as James Corden arrives – and although some of the others still seem stiff for a while after that, they mostly grow on you – particularly Daniel Rigby (whom I didn’t recognise) as the aspiring ac-tor inamorato. Corden’s amazing physical comedy is complemented by brilliant judgment: he works the audience as if doing stand-up yet he stays in character. He epitomises the production’s very appealing quality of variety. Most members of the cast do a musical number, often with novelty bells on; a skiffle band opens and punctuates proceedings – performing, very agreeably, some good pastiche songs by Grant Olding. The sustained exuberance of the cast’s physical hyperactivity is bracing. One Man, Two Guvnors hasn’t changed my view that stage acting is primitive compared with the best screen acting but the energetic pretence is great fun. It made me think that in future I should only go and see farces in the theatre – or, at any rate, plays where the style of acting doesn’t aim to be remotely naturalistic.
I’ve never seen anything done by Nicholas Hytner in the theatre. On the evidence of the screen version of The History Boys, to say that he lacks film-making flair would be putting it mildly, so it was good to get from this an understanding of his huge reputation as a stage director. The casting is wonderful in terms of the assortment of shapes and sizes assembled on stage, and Hytner’s orchestration of the company is masterly. Several of the performers are such extreme physical types that they’re effortlessly caricatural; although Corden, for example, has been stuffed into too-tight half-mast trousers that exaggerate the Billy Bunter effect, these extraordinary physiques are more genuine article than trompe l’oeil. Oliver Chris, as the public school guvnor, really must be as long and thin as he appears to be. Chris, who isn’t in that awkward opening scene, is a fine comic foil to Corden. There were moments in the first half when I wondered if he was stupid enough but his coming across as both educated and dense is soon beguiling. Tom Edden does an acrobatic turn as an aged waiter which can reasonably be described as painfully funny. The same goes for James Corden when the insatiably hungry Francis Henshall is trying to get a piece of cheese out of a mousetrap with his tongue.
But although Corden is marvellous and that mousetrap business is excruciating, neither quite compares with the most unforgettable presence on stage in One Man, Two Guvnors. Her name is Christine Patterson. In the course of the first half, Francis Henshall ropes in four members of the audience, culminating in Christine. In the last fifteen minutes before the interval, I found it hard to stay in my seat – partly because I needed the toilet but mostly because I couldn’t bear to watch this dutifully game but desperately unhappy woman. Christine’s discomfort – thinking her stooge agony was about to end then finding it repeatedly prolonged – was a vindication of my own pathological fears about audience participation. I kept hoping for signs she was in on the act but I hoped in vain. There was one moment that made me wonder momentarily – crouched under a table, her bottom half showing, Christine is kicked on the bum by James Corden and she disappears very promptly from view – but it wasn’t enough. When she was eventually sprayed with water and squirted with crazy foam I thought she must be a plant but then she cannoned into one of the flats, leaving a horribly real daub of foam on the set before she finally got offstage. During the theatre interval, Emma Freud goes backstage to talk with Nicholas Hytner and the cast, and at this point it becomes clear that Christine Patterson is not for real. (The other audience participants clearly were.) As relief coursed through me, I started wondering if this would have been better or worse in the theatre. Worse, probably – without the game being given away on that backstage tour (and because, if I’d been in the front stalls near Christine, there but for the grace …). On the other hand, in the theatre you’d not be so acutely aware of the precision and truthfulness of Polly Conway’s acting in the part of Christine. This is not just a matter of fooling the audience. It’s a superlative characterisation of a woman who’s gone to the theatre with every expectation of a good night out, and finds herself humiliated, her dress and evening ruined – having to play along, hating every moment of it.
9 October 2011
