This farce in a frenzy is OTT with knobs on! QUENTIN LETTS reviews A Wolf In Snakeskin Shoes

A Wolf In Snakeskin Shoes (Tricycle Theatre London)

Verdict: Frenzied farce

Rating:

American evangelical preachers are an easy target. Playwright Marcus Gardley puts one at the centre of his breathless rewrite of the Tartuffe story.

Moliere’s Tartuffe is the one in which a rich man is gulled by an apparently pious interloper. Mr Gardley’s version makes this fraudster a Southern U.S. preacher called Apostle Toof.

The Tricycle Theatre’s show gets off to a lively start with Toof preaching to the audience, accompanied by hearty gospel singers.

Feisty frolics: Peaches (Adjoa Andoh) and Toof (Lucian Msamati) in Marcus Gardley’s rewrite of Tartuffe

Lucian Msamati has a lot of fun playing the dreadful Toof, and there is a measure of amusement when he tries to seduce a brassy blonde. Toof’s wife (Sharon D. Clarke) is not amused to find her hiding under a table.

With Toof desperate for money, the story shifts to the house of sickly billionaire Archibald Organdy (Wil Johnson, looking rather too spry).

There are moments when the story achieves the balance of farcical madness and narrative logic found in a good Moliere production. Alas, there are also moments when the comedy feels forced and when surrealism descends into silliness.

Toof employs a maid who is meant to be Mexican but I’d say she is more convincingly East European. Miss Clarke combines well with Adjoa Andoh, playing the billionaire’s curvaceous girlfriend (she has a feisty speech declaring pride in her bodacious body).

Mrs Toof’s equanimity about her husband is nicely caught. In the last five minutes this often uneven play lurches into an interesting fulmination against religion.

Lucian Msamati has a lot of fun playing the dreadful Toof in A Wolf In Snake Skin Shoes at The Tricycle Theatre

There is certainly a dramatic pulse to this production but it could do with more polish and, perhaps, with some clearly spoken asides. Five per cent less frenzy and ten per cent more lucidity would improve it greatly. 

Anita and Me (Birmingham Rep)

Verdict: What's that you say?

Rating:

There is a mushy sense of multi-culturalism in the stage version of Meera Syal’s Anita And Me, a semi-autobiographical tale about an Indian immigrant family in Seventies’ Birmingham.

The show is harmless, so far as it goes. Or rather, what I could hear of it. What rotten acoustics the Birmingham Rep has. The story tells us that racism is unpleasant and that Britain’s Asian incomers arrived with strong notions of family, hard work and aspiration.

Much of this, all but the most knuckle-headed members of 21st-century Britain know and readily accept.

We see 13-year-old Meena (Mandeep Dhillon) struggling to balance the demands of her Indian family with her own wishes to mix with ‘cool’ white children.

Meena becomes best friends with a rough girl called Anita (Jalleh Alizadeh). Meena’s parents want her to buckle down and aim for a place at grammar school. Anita is more interested in unsuitable boyfriends.

This show has probably spent a fortune on Bob Bailey’s set which creates a small square in an area of two-up-two-down brick houses.

The close-knit community is about to have a motorway built through it. There is a sense of the whites in decline and the Asians on the rise through their self-esteem and their industry.

The story takes a relentlessly episodic approach with much stage bustle, seldom convincing. We are given a few songs but not enough to give a distinctive flavour. It is hard to escape a suspicion that director Roxana Silbert, along with adapter Tanika Gupta, could not quite work out the dramatic heart of the tale.

If they were puzzled, what about the rest of us, struggling to hear about 50 per cent of the words spoken by the two main girls?

A straw poll of other theatregoers at the interval suggested that this problem was not simply the result of your critic’s cloth ears.

Janice Connolly does a reliable turn as a kindly white neighbour. Amy Booth-Steel is cast as a local church worthy with racist leanings. Yasmin Wilde’s Indian grandmother brings at least a measure of authenticity to proceedings.