One Man, Two Guv’nors

One Man, Two Guv’nors – This Broadway farce is an import from London, directed by the famous Nicholas Hyttner and starring the great clown, James Cardon. The play is an adaptation of Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte show Servant of Two Masters, updated to Brighton and set during the early sixties – the Beatles have just made their first record and the show has several elaborate intermezzi featuring a Skiffle Band. The play is very funny, but, like all farce, exhausting – there’s just too much frenetic action, too many confusions and implausible disguises, too much spitting of food and water, too much too much. It’s churlish to complain that the play, which is generous with its one-liners and pratfalls, is simply too long – but, of course, it is. The plot is nothing but an excuse for set piece gags featuring the hapless Cardon greedily attempting to serve, and fleece, two small-time mobsters – one of them a woman in disguise. There is much posturing: one character is a Jamaican criminal, another fancies himself an actor and struts about like a young Lawrence Olivier. There is lots of grotesque sex, people hiding behind doors and eavesdropping on one another, and a lengthy Monty Python-style skit involving a superannuated waiter. The physical comedy is spectacularly assured. Cardon doesn’t hesitate to break character, taunts audience members, and, even, summons several of them onto the stage. The pay-off for Cardon’s improve is a scene involving a fantastically timid girl picked, apparently, at random from the audience who is sadistically humiliated on-stage, kicked and pushed and, then, set on fire. (Needless to say, the girl turns out to be a plant – but the earlier scene involving real members of the audience imparts a frightening, even savage, edge to the proceedings; we think the girl is one of us.) The Skiffle band is accomplished and the play is fast-paced and certainly brilliant in an intentionally vulgar manner. Like most Broadway hits, the tickets are incredibly expensive – nothing could possibly be worth what you have to pay to see this thing, although Cardon does everything in his power to make the experience worth the cost. This play, which is partly a musical, may be something that can be adapted to the screen – but there will be challenges: much of the show’s appeal arises from the fact that the audience is involved in theater of this kind, the fourth wall exists only to be battered down, and the laughter of the crowd is as much a part of the show as the tacky sets and the semi-grotesque costumes (Cardon wears an ugly tartan-patterned brown suit – a reminder that he is Harlequin in his checked attire). Farce cuts deeper and is more disturbing in some ways than tragedy; we are not likely to bed our mothers, or kill our fathers or our children or poke out own eyes. But all of us will be badly embarrassed from time to time, suffer hunger and lust, and have unfortunate accidents in the toilet. So there is something particularly inescapable about farce. (I saw this production a block from Broadway on 45th Street at the Shubert Theater on Monday at 8:00 pm, July 2, 2012).