Theatre
Pass the false breasts, please
Published 24 July 2006
Alan Bennett's disappointingly dated farce smacks of mid-life crisis
Habeas Corpus Theatre Royal Bath
The poster for Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus shows James Fleet (an actor still best known for being the bumbling friend with the dog in Four Weddings) adopting the famous Christine Keeler position across the back of a chair. The analogy is apt, for this 1973 farce is all about illicit sex, and the more of it the better.
The play is set amid the goings-on in a GP's surgery, and has most of the men taking their trousers down, most of the women getting their breasts squeezed, and lots of fumblings behind a medical screen. While it is indebted to Joe Orton's surreal (and superior) medical farce What the Butler Saw, it is also reminiscent of Terry and June, with jokes about fat women, pert breasts, and looking up ladies' skirts. In short, it's a bit dated.
Arthur Wicksteed (Fleet), a family doctor, is, at 53, suffering a particularly acute bout of mid-life crisis. He falls for just about anything in a skirt. He dislikes his hypochondriac son, and he can't stand his wife, who in frustrated revenge tries desperately to seduce not only a former amour, but also the salesman who has arrived to fit her sister's false breasts. The sister, Constance, is herself trying to escape a ten-year-long engagement to a local vicar, Canon Throbbing.
Much merriment ensues, with unwanted pregnancies and unsuccessful suicide bids upping the pace. Patent leather boots, jokes about Ted Heath and references to the recent Second World War reinforce the period feel.
As part of Peter Hall's annual repertory season, this production shares Bath's Theatre Royal with several other shows. It is therefore staged rather oddly in an unfurnished stainless-steel drum, which must variously represent a genteel living room, a GP's surgery, and Brighton's West Pier.
There are certainly lots of doors for the obligatory rapid-fire exits and entries, but this satire on sexual frustration in Hove and the "permissive society" of the 1960s really needs an array of domestic clutter to give it some grounding. With the production's ruthlessly abstract set, not to mention its surreal moments of soliloquy and song, I had to concentrate hard on working out where each scene was heading. Indeed, I was more concerned with this than I was with experiencing the ecstasy of pure farce, which in a perfect world should spin in an ever-tightening circle to a series of side-splitting denouements.
Alan Bennett, who hit 40 when the first production of Habeas Corpus was on, was probably going through a bit of a mid-life crisis of his own when he wrote this, his third full play. Middle age is certainly not given a run for its money. Mrs Wicksteed, played by Annette Badland like a Persian cat in chintz, speaks of her body as "a saggy parcel of vanilla blancmange", and depicts her fifties as a bleak, twin-bedded life with "the menopause showing its nose above the horizon".
Meanwhile Dr Wicksteed, who has spent a lifetime falling for the nubile temptations of his scantily clad patients, is really no more happy than his rival Sir Percy Shorter, who has spent his life, in the main, avoiding them. Which is the better route to take, Dr Wicksteed ponders: gather ye rosebuds, or leave them well alone?
Either way, he muses, you will be left with regret. Constance achieves sexual fulfilment thanks only to donning a pair of £5 false breasts, while Felicity (Caitlin Mottram), the bit of skirt who arrives to tempt nearly everybody, will accept marriage only if her fiancé is suffering from a terminal illness and won't last long.
There are shadows here of Carry On, of Oscar Wilde and obviously of Orton, but even given its considerable dollops of theatrical talent, and the sure touch of Peter Hall, this Habeas Corpus never really comes into its own.
There is one delightful moment of farcical stage business, when everyone slaps everyone else on the cheek, but it is only Mrs Wicksteed, aided by some terrific lines (including the magnificent "At last! A tenant for my fallow loins"), who has the satirical firepower, physical absurdity and comic timing to be an honourable heir to the weighty mantle of Lady Bracknell.
For further booking details visit www.theatreroyal.org.uk
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