May 6, 2008
For those who (like me) prefer early Stoppard, before he became all tortured and complicated and much less funny, Dirty Linen is a little gem, light, sparkling and brilliant. It’s only an hour long, but crammed with witty wordplay, caustic one-liners and delicious satire that still packs a punch today, some thirty years after it was written. We still have a very much male-dominated House of Commons, members of whom are still pilloried regularly in the press for sleaze, though most people would be fairly relieved nowadays if the sleaze consisted of having affairs with luscious raven-haired (female) beauties; and parliamentary committees are still beavering away producing reports that are perfect exercises in compromise and coverup. Apart from the use of paper diaries and the odd mention of Charles and Di, the play has scarcely dated at all.
This production was in the competent hands of an extraordinarily experienced bunch of first and second year thesps and, apart from very occasional displays of first night nerves, they acquitted themselves very nicely. They were all excellent, but special mention must go to Tom Wilkinson as Henry Cocklebury-Smythe and Jonathan Fisher as Malcolm Withenshaw, who were delightful and very funny. I’m afraid the casting of Roseanna Frascona as Miss Maddie Gotobed may have backfired slightly – she was such a luscious raven-haired beauty and had such an astonishingly lovely figure that, as her clothes were gradually removed in the second part of the play, her gorgeousness rather overwhelmed the incisive intelligence and authoritative common sense with which the character triumphs over the patriarchal peckerheads in the script.
Well worth a look.
This production was in the competent hands of an extraordinarily experienced bunch of first and second year thesps and, apart from very occasional displays of first night nerves, they acquitted themselves very nicely. They were all excellent, but special mention must go to Tom Wilkinson as Henry Cocklebury-Smythe and Jonathan Fisher as Malcolm Withenshaw, who were delightful and very funny. I’m afraid the casting of Roseanna Frascona as Miss Maddie Gotobed may have backfired slightly – she was such a luscious raven-haired beauty and had such an astonishingly lovely figure that, as her clothes were gradually removed in the second part of the play, her gorgeousness rather overwhelmed the incisive intelligence and authoritative common sense with which the character triumphs over the patriarchal peckerheads in the script.
Well worth a look.