Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!

Published Monday 4 February 2008 at 11:50 by Andrew Liddle

Farces just don’t come any funnier than this belter from the 1970s by Dario Fo, the great Italian satirist.

His take on the self-reduction movement where, in a time of rampant inflation, women led the way in liberating what they wanted from markets and paying only what they could afford, is a masterpiece with obvious roots in commedia dell’arte.

Marie Critchtley is quite superb as the feisty and inventive Antonia whose need to stash away the shopping she has liberated leads to all manner of problems. The most to suffer is dithering neighbour Margherita, done to perfection by Michelle Hardwick, having to suddenly become heavily pregnant - with bags of fruit and veg.

The problem is Antonia’s husband Giovanni (Howard Chadwick), is a bit of a jobsworth and can’t be taken into the plot; and Margherita’s Luigi (Phil Rowson), is too dim-witted to cotton on anyway. So both men labour under comic misapprehensions of gigantic proportions, whilst gourmandising on rabbits’ brains, dog food and millet seed.

Throw into the mix a couple of policemen, both uncannily like hard-working actor Steve Huison, and the mayhem is complete. Huison blunders around like Frankie Howerd impersonating Tommy Cooper in a variety of roles, in fact, and is good value in all of them.

This is physical theatre at its best with some wonderful set-pieces. Who could forget the lorry crash, which stimulates a frenzy of looting, the audience gloriously complicit in disposing of the knock-off?

Another triumph for director Kevin Shaw.