On face value you might consider John O’Keefe’s Wild Oats a peculiar choice of play to re-open Bristol Old Vic after a long period of closure for refurbishment. Few will have heard of the play or its author; but on entering the frankly mad world O’Keefe envisions, the case for this play becomes clear.
Written in 1791, the play and the theatre are near-contemporaries, both born in the latter half of the 18th century and, in a smart inversion of usual business, it is the play that provides a vehicle for the auditorium to shine. Wild Oats is a deliberately absurd piece of writing: a dubious case of mistaken identity triggers several others, as the protagonist Jack Roper (elegantly and sympathetically realised by Sam Alexander) rides his luck in London’s theatreland.
Chaos ensues. O’ Keefe delights in making things as difficult and confusing as possible for his hapless characters. The danger therein is that the audience too can lose their way and on occasion Mark Rosenblatt’s ambitious production succumbs to this. Its chief success is the way in which the 21st and 18th centuries within the production collide to create a cross epochal monster.
Ben Stone’s infectious, playful design creates a theatre within a theatre, full of suggestions of space and time nicked from Kneehigh, NIE and companies of their ilk. The production draws the audience’s attention to the new Old Vic auditorium, to theatre in general, and the ridiculousness of the act of adult make-believe. The performances further tease out this self-referential quality, bordering on spoof at times they recall the subversive anti-theatre of Spymonkey and Ridiculusmus as much as anything. It is as if they’re saying, “don’t look at me – look at what I’m doing, and more importantly still – look where I’m doing it.” There is no doubting the true star of the show: the auditorium itself. This production manages to engage the audience with their surroundings in a way which Bristol arguably hasn’t seen since Banksy took on the City Museum, and for that civic feat alone the production is hugely compelling.
As an out and out comedy Wild Oats has very little margin for error: be funny or die. There is no emotional depth to mine or much in the way of jeopardy. When it does make ’em laugh, the cast – superbly led by Hugh Skinner’s posh nob Harry Thunder – milk it for all it’s worth. But though there are regular flashes of hilarity, one can’t help but notice there are gags here that might best be disappeared. But these are mere niggles; this is a show that threatens to explode at any given second. And as comedy is a beast that tends to grow not shrink, Bristol Old Vic’s theatregoers in the days and weeks to come may well find themselves in danger of dying with laughter.
