✭✭✭✭✩

by Richard Bean, directed by Chris Abraham

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 22-October 13, 2024

Francis: “You got to concentrate, ain’t ya, with two jobs. Cor! I can do it, long as I don’t get confused. But I get confused easily.”

If you’re looking for a sure-fire, laugh-till-your-sides-hurt comedy this summer, look no further than One Man, Two Guvnors at the Shaw Festival. The show is the funniest play at the Festival since the heyday of farces at the Shaw with Heath Lamberts in the 1980s. I happen to have seen the original production in London in 2011 after it transferred from the National Theatre to the West End. The Shaw production is every bit as funny, the pacing by director Chris Abraham is ideal and Peter Fernandes in the James Corden role of Francis Henshall is hilarious.

Bean’s play is an adaptation of the best-known comedy by Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), Il Servitore di due padrone (1743). Goldoni is known for writing comedies featuring characters echoing the familiar figures of the commedia dell’arte. Bean has relocated the action from Venice in the mid-18th century to Brighton in 1963 but has kept very close to the action in Goldoni’s play. Bean has, however, completely rewritten and Briticized the dialogue in the absurdist style of television sketch series like Monty Python. Farce is often thought of as the most purely theatrical dramatic genre since the question “Who is where when?” on the stage is the most critical point not “What does anyone think?” Yet, Bean’s dialogue is funny in itself and gives the farcical structure an added layer of verbal comedy that the genre normally does not have.

In Bean’s version the plot concerns Rachel Crabbe, twin sister of the gangster Roscoe Crabbe, and her quest. Brighton gangster Charlie Clench had hoped his daughter Pauline would marry Roscoe, but before the action of the play Roscoe has been murdered. Charlie now plans to marry Pauline to a would-be actor and crooked lawyer’s son, Alan. As an engagement party for Pauline and Alan is about to proceed when who should arrive but Roscoe Crabbe himself (actually Rachel in disguise) and “his” servant Francis Henshall. Francis had promised to help Rachel find the man who murdered her brother.

Francis is loyal to Rachel, but she fails to pay him enough so that Francis is constantly starving. In town Francis meets a seemingly rich toff, Stanley Stubbers, who engages Francis to do various services for him. Francis is happy to take on a second master to supplement his income and supplement his diet. Little does Francis know at the time that Stanley is exactly the man that Rachel is trying to find. Even less does Francis know that Rachel is seeking him not for revenge but for love. Thus, all Francis’s precautions that his two masters never meet is precisely what thwarts Rachel’s plan.

The minute details of the plot concerning who gave what to whom when and why becomes so complicated as to be unfollowable. All we really need to know is 1) that Francis is keeping the two people apart who most should meet, and 2) after Francis has sated his hunger in Act 1 he turns his attention to winning Charlie’s curvaceous secretary Dolly.

Peter Fernandes gives a lovely performance as Francis. He projects Francis’s key traits which are his innocence and his humility. In a metatheatrical moment, Bean makes Francis aware that in commedia dell’arte he would be the Harlequin, or archetypal comic servant, of the play. (Indeed, in Goldoni the character is named Arlecchino.) Fernandes plays Francis as a congenial character who lies only to protect himself or his two guvnors, but, of course, the more he lies, the more difficult it is to remember what he said to whom. Francis endearingly knows he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so when someone asks him a question, he often turns to the audience to say, “I’ve gotta be very careful what I say here”. Fernandes’ acting is so natural and his surprise at the turn of events seems so real that it feels as if he is improvising many of his lines on the spot (though he is not). Fernandes has never had to carry a whole show before, but his performance here proves that can.

Another outstanding performance comes Shaw Festival regular Fiona Byrne, who in her 21 seasons with the Shaw has never had to play a role like Rachel Crabbe. As Roscoe, dressed in a man’s suit and sporting a moustache and Ringo Starr wig, the petite Ms. Byrne could look foolish, but she doesn’t. She has such presence and a such a command of posture and voice that she handily and believably cows all the large males around her. When she is able to drop her masquerade with Francis, she reveals the ardent and love-smitten Rachel. It’s a great performance.

As the object of Rachel’s love and Francis’s second guvnor, Martin Happer is hilarious as Stanley Stubbers. Happer pays Stanley as a parody of the dashing but empty-headed upper class twit who takes the homosexuality and sadomasochism of private school as a part of the package he didn’t mind. In fact, he confesses he still enjoys pain. Happer is expert at making Stanley appear above the fray because Stanley doesn’t really understand what the fray is all about.

Matt Alfano is a real delight in the role of the aged Alfie on his first day as a waiter who gets terribly knocked about during the famed scene of serving dinner to two rooms. Slapstick directed against an 80-yerar-old might look like elder abuse, but Alfano, renowned as a dancer at both Stratford and the Shaw, makes us admire his physical skill in portraying all of Alfie’s multiple head-knocks and falls.

Kiera Sangster is hoot as Dolly, Charlie’s secretary, who is an outspoken feminist but is willing to let men like Francis take advantage of her if she’s in the mood. Dolly’s Act 2 lecture to the women in the audience on the dangers of men is one of the show’s highlights, especially when Dolly looks forward to Britain’s first female prime minister (who turned out to be Margaret Thatcher) whom she knows will bring about “a more just and fair society”.

In smaller roles, André Morin is amusingly ridiculous as the pretentious would-be actor Alan Dangle in love with Pauline. Tom Rooney, topped with a deliberately bad toupée, makes a fine intellectually challenged gangster Charlie Clench. Patrick Galligan is suitably smarmy as Charlie’s dodgy lawyer Harry Dangle, father of Alan. And Allan Louis is fun as one of Charlie’s gang, Lloyd Boateng, who seems to have had a richer life in prison than outside.

Goldoni’s original play had musical interludes by composers of the time. Bean’s adaptation has musical interludes by a skiffle band, a type of band playing impromptu folk and blues songs that became very popular in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s. The present band includes Alfano, Galligan, Happer and Graeme Somerville. The leader and principal singer is the dynamic Lawrence Libor who puts across every song with verve and just the right sense of humour. The secondary singer is Jade Repeta, who sings with a delightfully knowing parodic edge. You would never know unless you look at the programme that Repeta also plays Charlie’s airheaded daughter Pauline, so utterly distinct does Repeta make them.

The skiffle band has a set before the show begins which is so enjoyable that I would urge audience members to arrive early to see them. They establish the lighthearted satirical mood that pervades the entire show and breaks any notion of a fourth wall between the players and the audience. Because of the band the characters’ numerous asides and direct speech to the audience feel completely natural as does the use of volunteers from the audience.

Director Chris Abraham has shown himself a master of insightful productions of Shakespeare’s comedy and tragedy (e.g., A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2014 and Julius Caesar in 2020), other classic drama (e.g., Uncle Vanya in 2022), modern plays (e.g., The Master Plan in 2023) and musicals (e.g., Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 in 2023). With One Man, Two Guvnors, Abraham proves that he is also a master of directing farce. His sense of tone and pacing, so crucial to the success of farce, are spot on. He knows the key to farce is that the more seriously the characters take their situation, the funnier it is. Very few directors in Canada have ever displayed such facility in all of these very different realms of theatre. This production demonstrates, if we didn’t already know it, that Abraham is one of the finest, most versatile directors now working in Canada.

One Man, Two Guvnors is so blissfully funny and so well directed, designed and performed that anyone living in or visiting Southern Ontario should immediately add it to their must-see list. A further run in a major city would be a great idea.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Cast of One Man, Two Guvnors; Peter Fernandes as Francis and Martin Happer as Stanley; Fiona Byrne as Roscoe, André Morin as Alan, Jade Repeta as Pauline and Allan Louis as Lloyd; the skiffle band: Martin Happer, Jade Repeta, Graeme Somerville, Lawrence Libor, Matt Alfano and Patrick Galligan. © 2024 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.