First staged in 1927, Thark was the third of nine popular Aldwych farces Ben Travers wrote for the theatre’s actor-manager Tom Walls and his ensemble company featuring the likes of Ralph Lynn and Robertson Hare. Following on from the better-known A Cuckoo in the Nest and Rookery Nook, Thark’s eccentric mash-up of sex farce with haunted house parody may sometimes seem as creaky as the eponymous rickety residence that is the setting for Act Two, but it still has a period charm.
The wafer-thin plot starts with Sir Hector Benbow’s failed attempt to seduce a shop girl he has picked up because his wife returns to their Mayfair flat early. In trying to help his uncle out of this scrape Ronny gets himself into hot water with his fiancée, Sir Hector’s ward Kitty. The characters then go off to Thark, the country house just sold to nouveau riche Mrs Frush and her gormless son, to investigate complaints about the ghostly goings on there, leading to more misunderstandings and mishaps.
This slick adaptation of the play by Clive Francis has cut out one character – an investigative journalist – without losing anything of substance, although it has to be said, like the elusive ghost, Thark is notable for its insubstantiality. This is pure farce as innocuous as soap bubbles, owing much more to Pinero’s cheery boisterousness than Feydeau’s dark-edged illicit liaisons – very English escapist fun in the P.G. Wodehouse mould. Despite its stock characterization, stereotypical portrait of gender and class relations, implausible situations, and weak structure, Thark still amuses and entertains with its guileless good humour.
For Snapdragon Productions, director Eleanor Rhodes keeps the action flowing freely, while designer Cherry Truluck’s fragmented wooden frames, glowing hearth, crooked bookcase and creaking staircase sets the scene well for the haunted house but more could be done to distinguish the London flat. The lighting flashes of Gary Bowman and strange sounds of Georg Dennis really come into their own in the second act during the disturbed night of thunderstorm and spookiness.
Francis himself is in fine comic fettle playing the lead as the tweedy, monocled Sir Hector, a roving-eyed ageing lecher afraid of Mary Keegan’s commanding Lady Benbow, who knows her husband’s tricks all too well. James Dutton gives a very funny, admirably straight-faced performance as the well-meaning but hapless Ronny, perpetually in trouble with Claire Cartwright’s suspicious but soft-hearted Kitty. Lucy May Barker is the out-of-depth sales assistant Cherry who attracts Richard Beanland’s sexually desperate Lionel Thrush, while as his socially awkward mother Joanna Wake looks like she’s auditioning for the part of Madame Arcati. And Andrew Jarvis is splendidly sepulchral as the butler Jones, whose real name he intones to his horrified listeners is ‘Death’.
