All photos: The Other Richard

Alan Bennett is past master of insouciant incongruity – and trademark eloquent silences which are often hilarious and sometimes poignant. It’s slightly odd to see a Bennett story adapted by a different writer but I can confirm that Adrian Scarborough has more than nailed it. My only slight gripe is that Bennett’s novella of the same name dates from 1997. Scarborough has made some attempt to update it with references to Mary Berry, not being in the EU, digital TV and the like but it isn’t always consistent bcause we also get polaroid photographs and Kiri te Kanawa (now 78 and retired)  in live performance. Thus the play doesn’t always feel historically quite secure but it doesn’t matter much.

Maurice Ransome (Adrian Scarbrough) and his wife Rosemary (Sophie Thompson) have been to Covent Garden. Cue for several glorious Cos fan tutte sound bites. When they get home to their flat they discover that, in their absence it has been burgled: emptied, stripped bare so that they are left with just the titular clothes on their backs. Even the lavatory roll has gone which allows Bennett the opportunity for a few of his characterstic bodily funtions jokes. He has been accused, with some justification, of an obsession with excrement.

The unlikely plot which follows gives us – with Bennett’s unique blend of wistfulness and laughter – the chance to explore the Ransomes’ marriage, the significance of possessions, what friendship really means and a great deal more.

Scarborough and Thompson are magnificent together. He is, of course, insufferable with his bossy, pedantic, humourless, bigotry,  and self-absorption. Most of us would have put arsenic in his tea long ago. But his wife is loyal, dutiful and long suffering so she doesn’t do that. Thompson does a good line in brittle dappiness, deep underneath which is an independent woman who’d really quite like a life. She has a way of communicating – and getting laughs – by just looking. And everyone in the audience knows exactly what she’s thinking.

Also outstanding in this production are the three support actors: Ned Costello, Charlie de Melo and Natasha Magigi. Between them they play a whole raft of meaty cameo roles with oodles of versatility and impressive voice work. Magigi, for instance, delights as the overbearing, hands-on (literally) counsellor. De Melo’s Mr Anwar, local shopkeeper is warm and caring in stark contrast to Scarborough’s character. And Costello, who graduated from LAMDA, only last year is definitely one to watch. He pops up in so many convincing roles you keep blinking and checking that it’s the same actor.

A word of praise too for Robert Jones’s ingenious set which, using advancing and receding hydraulics, gives us the Ransomes’ sitting room in three different guises along with several smaller roll-on, roll-off scene evokers.

It’s well worth a trip to Nottingham.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-clothes-they-stood-up-in/

• 

  All photos: The Other Richard

• 
• 
•