Menier Chocolate Factory – until 16 November 2024
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
5*****
Nancy Carrroll’s brilliant adaptation of Arthur Wing Pinero’s Victorian farce is a sublimely silly and salient show.
The Right Hon Sir Julian Twombley (Nicholas Rowe) is under pressure as his spendthrift family’s extravagant lifestyle has led to questions about his acceptance of gifts. As he contemplates jumping before he is pushed, and a future growing his own vegetables in a country cottage, his wife Kitty (Nancy Carroll) gets deeper and deeper in debt to the social climbing Lacklustre siblings (the wonderful Phoebe Fildes and Laurence Ubong Williams) in acts titled Debt, Difficulties, Disaster, and Dancing.
The Twombley’s son, Brooke (Joe Edgar) is as bad with money as his mother, while daughter Imogen’s (Rosalind Ford) season, and her aunt Dora’s (Sara Crowe) marital plans for her, are disrupted by the return of old family friend Valentine (George Blagden). The modern parallels are obvious but never overdone and highlight how little British society has really changed. Great fun is had from the hypocrisy of the gentry on their uppers and making dubious choices looking down their noses at the lower classes, even when those people are funding their lifestyle.
As romantic and financial complications mount, the entrances and exits (and ludicrous attempts at hiding on Janet Bird’s gorgeous set) are perfectly timed. The script is jam-packed with dry wit, daftness and double entendres, all delivered with wonderful energy by the stellar cast. While Nicholas Rowe’s calm head of the family, weighed down by his career troubles is the placid body of the swan, Nancy Carroll’s Kitty is his perfect foil – the legs frantically flapping underwater. Her demeanour changes from manically bemoaning the tragedy of her circumstances to business like matriarch in the blink of an eye, and her mounting panic as things get increasingly out of her control is a masterclass in comedy. Sara Crowe’s magnificent meddling sister-in-law thinks she’s hit the jackpot marrying off Imogen to Sir Colin Macphail (Matthew Woodyatt), and the presence of the dour Scots onstage is always a delight as Dillie Keane steals the show as Lady Macphail – always ready to declare her distaste for the south, and launching into passionate descriptions of their ancestral home that become increasingly florid and Shakespearean as Colin struggles to string even a few words together.
Director Paul Foster directs with a deft touch, and the decision to have each act punctuated by the cast playing instruments provides even more light-hearted energy – and many opportunities for fiddling jokes. Fast, funny and full of brilliant performances, The Cabinet Minister is an absolute triumph.