FINANCIAL TIMES
25.9.86
Michael Coveney
Pinero's The Magistrate was last seen in London in a mangeled, ungainly version three years ago (Little Lies starring John Mills) and any complaints that Jonathan Lynn's National company has embarked upon a sedate crash course in comic museum pieces must first be tempered with pleasure at hearing this play again. It is a wonderful farce of discomfiture, a whoopee cushion shunted firmly under the bottom of a defender of propriety and the law, family values and clean living.
The tone of querulous dismay is set by Posket's first hint that things might be going wrong: "How came nuts into the drawing room?" he enquires, Nigel Hawthorne scanning the luxuriant Bloomsbury interior designed by Carl Toms to suit a High Court judge let alone a jobbing police magistrate. Michael Rudman's production treats the lines with spruce affection without sending them up. So the worst possible fate that can befall a retired army officer detained at Her Majesty's pleasure sounds just that: "I have been washed by the authorities" declares an outraged Donald Pickering, gills redenning.
As Kenneth Tynan once remarked in respect of Pinero, plays renowned for their construction are often hinged on implausible, or at least fragile, detail. Posket is a lapsed bachelor who has married a widow he met abroad at a spa. Agatha has lied about her age and has passed of a 19 year-old son as five years younger. The advanced pubescent Cis (Graeme Henderson) is in love with his music teacher, and has already developed into a hardened gambler and a sipper of port. When Agatha and her sister Charlotte decamp to warn an impending dinner guest against spilling the beans, Cis drags Posket off to a shady club in Meek Street.
This second act, with its coincidental accumulation of characters culminating in a police raid to enforce the licensing law is one of the finest in English farce, worthy of comparison with Feydeau. The retired colonel is accompanied by Charlotte's ex-fiance, Captain Vale (Nicholas le Prevost) scalded after Charlotte's gift of "worked slippers" to another man. The social proprieties of friendly concern are undermined by the necessity of Vale hiding on a balcony in the rain, when the ladies call.
Charlotte has been travelling all day and Alison Fiske, in an immensely stylish and husky performance, is seized with hunger for the oysters which keep moving around in a sort of bizarre juggling act with her own sodden, hidden and increasingly peeved lover. For good measure, Mr le Prevost throws in an excellent lemon-throwing gag to relieve his sepulchral despondency. Such attention to character portrayal is of course what makes the evening funny.
After the collapsing balcony and Posket's escape to Maida Vale and (dred purlieu) Kilburn, Cyril Shaps's finical Mulberry Street clerk brings a world of professional and marital decorum onstage with his daring exchange of a dark cravat for a coloured one to celebrate his silver anniversary and risk Posket's disapproval.
There is a strain of surreal panic forever associated in my mind with Alistair Sim in the main role. Nigel Hawthorne does not have that aura of celestial despair nor, if I am honest, does he really suggest that the bottom has fallen out of his world.
After sentencing his own wife to seven days, Hawthorne staggers back to Bloomsbury rigid with opoplexy and cramped musculature. When the ladies return ("There's going to be an explanation" whispers Miss Fiske with devastating confidentiality) he poses in the window like a statue with back ache. I recall Alistair Sim all but sliding into the wallpaper, back to the audience, searching for a crack in the wall; Mr Hawthorne wants to regain domestic poise, not obliterate his very existence.
That said, he is a very funny spectacle, bruised and battered after his night on the tiles. His "painful interview" with the colonel finds him gripping the table in agony and righteously plonking his pince-nez on a nose bridge he had momentarily forgotten to be as mutilated as a losing boxer's after ten rounds.
Gemma Craven has the flighty measure of Agatha though not her Victorian stylishness. She seems, in fact, to be in the wrong play. But Mr Rudman's cast, though not as stellar as National Theatre audiences might expect in such a play, is solid and consistent all the way down with notable cameos from Terence Bayler as a critical butler, Michael Beint as an unflappable sergeant and Ken Stott as an icily controlled inspector.
