★★✰✰✰
They say comedy is about timing. Well, here is a comedy that is fifty years out of date.
Based on Sheridan’s The Rivals, Jack Absolute Flies Again has a lot in common with another comedy of manners that is no stranger to British theatres: HMS Pinafore is the spiritual ancestor to Jack Absolute. They both poke fun at British idiosyncrasies, power hierarchies, and social values. But poking fun at these conventions only reinforces them. And whilst when HMS Pinafore premiered, Britain really did rule the waves, today knee deep in social, political, and economic crises, Jack Absolute Flies Again is distinctly unmodern and out of touch with its sepia toned memories of yesteryear and World War Two romance. Nostalgia is not what it used to be.
Jack Absolute marks Richard Bean’s returns to the National with the spiritual successor to One Man, Two Guvnors. Instead of taking Commedia dell’arte and placing it 1960s East End, Here Bean (along with writer Oliver Chris) place The Rivals in a World War Two country house requisitioned by the RAF. Its set is reticent of vintage travel posters promising pleasant pastures and a green and pleasant
land. The heroes are dashing toffs turned RAF pilots who give the Hun a jolly good roughing up.
It’s the debonair whimsey et in arcadia ego of Brideshead Revisited with the nudge-nudge wink-wink comedy of the Carry-On films. It’s all spiffing afternoon tea, crochet on the lawn, and more innuendos than a 1970s sitcom. All of this is set against the backdrop of the Second World War which saw, not to be morose, genocide, mass murder, and unspeakable horrors are occurring across Europe.
Both the play and the production’s sensibility feel uncomfortably outdated. Most of the jokes are either crass word play, thanks to Caroline Quentin’s Mrs Malaprop who mispronounces words, trite slapstick, or are punching down at the expense of someone who is not a privileged societal elite. Kelvin Fletcher’s Dudley Scunthorpe is on the receiving end of many jabs aimed at the fact he is northern. Yes, in some sense it is mocking the snooty class-obsessed ruling classes who are themselves classist, but the nastiness lingers given that not enough is done to dismantle the hierarchies by the end of the play to justify it.
It is the same for James Corrigan’s Bob Acres, an Australian pilot. He has some witty one liners and his physicality is highly polished, but his character’s dim-wittedness, and therefore his comedic value, is predicated on the fact he is not at the top of the social hierarchy. It leaves a sour taste when you scratch beneath the surface.
It is also obvious in Bean and Chris’s polemics about feminism, here shoehorned in as a tick box exercise seemingly to give the play the faintest morsel of relevance. Jack Absolute’s love interest, Natalie Simpson’s heiress-cum fighter-pilot Lydia Languish, waxes lyrical about gender rights and liberalism. She proclaims that she will never marry for status yet in the end still fall into the arms of her debonair public-school Beau.
Some people will find Jack Absolute Flies Again entertaining. Its comedy is not difficult, and neither is its plot. It is a crowd pleaser, or at least it wants to be. But given that it is predicated on such an archaic weltanschauung, one born in a cultural climate far less progressive or egalitarian than our own, it is perplexing to think why the National Theatre would commission this let alone produce it on the Olivier stage for two months.
Words by Alexander Cohen
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