The Stage

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!

Published Thursday 17 February 2005 at 12:20 by Pat Ashworth

This is farce at its finest, a beautifully paced production that freefalls towards lunacy as the characters become hopelessly entangled in their own deceptions. What starts out as a couple of bags of stolen shopping ends in pregnancies, hunchbacks and a mad appearance of the Pope on the balcony - all without losing any of Fo’s invective against galloping inflation and the trampling of workers’ rights in 1970s Italy.

Green Shield stamps and EU butter mountains evoke the Britain of the period in this fresh and audacious adaptation. It is physical theatre at its best as the housewives, feisty Antonia (Jo Donnelly) and the hapless Margherita (Phillipa Peak), go to ever more elaborate lengths to conceal from their husbands the spoils of the mass protest against rising prices. The pair are wholly in tune and their comic timing is impeccable, as it is with James Weaver as Giovanni and Sean McKenzie as Luigi.

Redundancy is the last straw that forces the husbands to abandon the moral high ground. The simulated lorry crash that delivers food into their hands is the trigger for a wave of madness in which the audience becomes a human chain, passing sacks over their heads and directed by a megaphone-wielding Inspector suggesting they use the rhythm method.

Christopher Chilton has the best fun of all playing everyone else in the plot. He gets stuffed into a cupboard, pumped with oxygen from welding equipment and elevated in funeral dress from a trapdoor before making a final appearance in angel’s wings. Simply glorious.