Review: See How They Run, York Theatre Royal

Many of the directors who lead the theatres of Yorkshire seem slightly obsessed with the question – every piece of work that is programmed for the stage, needs to have a pertinence about it – otherwise, why do it?

That question does not appear to have been investgated too thoroughly with this production.

York Theatre Royal is staging an admirable season of work with a strand simply called Yorkshire Season. No Tyke is going to hail that a bad thing.

Philip King’s classic farce slips in well to this strand, the playwright having been born in Beverley and joining a touring acting troupe in his teenage years, which travelled the North.

The play, however, needs to be the thing. It needs to be relevant and have a reason for existing in a season’s programme. It’s hard to see those reasons in this production.

King’s most famous farce was written as the Second World War came to a close. A tale of several mistaken identities, a German escaped POW and a bishop, it is so old-fashioned as to have a vicar actually pouring tea. The phrase ‘more tea vicar’ might not ever be uttered, but it would not be an enormous surprise were it to escape the lips of one of the chracters.

We are faced here with a play where there are gasps at the fact that the vicar’s wife, horror of horrors, wears trousers in public.

The problem then, initially lies in the age of the material. Some have called it a classic, but classics need something to allow them to continue to be relevant and that something is starkly missing here. A farce so stuck in a period being played today needs to be able to laugh at itself, have a cheeky nudge and a wink and demonstrate it knows how ridiculous it is. Two laudable exceptions aside, that simply doesn’t happen here and this is played all too straight.

It makes for a leaden-footed piece of work that is way behind the pace at which a farce needs to be played and which has potential laughs that are simply missed.

Lucy Phelps as Ida and Philip Mansfield as a stuttering, nervous Rev Humphrey are the exceptions who appear to know they are in a situation that is meant to be ridiculous and funny. The rest of the production falters.

To Oct 12.