The Stage

Arsenic and Old Lace

Published Friday 2 September 2005 at 12:05 by Pat Ashworth

Joseph Alford’s production of this classic black comedy goes beyond eccentricity to a glorious lunacy. This is a mad world expressed in physical theatre and French-influenced mime, and because it bears no relation to any conventional production it comes over as a fresh, new offering.

The Brewsters’ Brooklyn house is a tall fragment of a building that looks as though some of the lines that make up the structure have been erased. Offstage characters remain visible on a surrounding deck, in a mistiness and half-light that reinforces the unreality of it all. Much of the humour comes from the use of imaginary doors and staircases, all handled in character. There is divine comedy from the corpses, who visibly roll away after being thrust down into the window seat, and exaggerated reactions as big as cartoons.

Helen Blatch and Geraldine Newman play the murdering Brewster sisters with gentle quaintness as they glide around in their anachronistic bustles. Kesselring created gleeful male roles in the mad Teddy (Tom Godwin), faking muffled phone calls through a megaphone, the mad Boris Karloff lookalike (Dominic Burdess) and the sane but wildly extrovert Mortimer (Oliver Senton).

George Potts is the fast-talking Brooklyn cop and wannabe playwright and there is a delicious role for Lucien MacDougall in the heavily Germanic Dr Einstein. The production brings out all the wit of the text in lines like “Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops” and “Playwrights are killing the theatre”. It is manic - one big chuckle from start to finish.