Jack Absolute Flies Again (recorded)

National Theatre at Home, 07/04/24

Credit: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg

Final rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Let me address the elephant in the room: No, I wasn’t there, so the experience is different. But I watched it all the same and wanted to write my review.

A re-hashed military adaptation of Sheridan’s restoration comedy play, The Rivals, the concept shouldn’t work. But it does – just. The writers, Oliver Chris and Richard Bean, are obviously Blackadder fans – and at points it’s made blatantly obvious with borrowed lines such as “bugger me with a fish fork”, and the inclusion of a projection of a plane going down in a dogfight with the enemy while dubbing the actor’s voices over the sequence. There is all the camaraderie of a military satire and it is very enjoyable to watch. But it does at times stray into ‘silly’ territory, and I think the actors have to work very hard to toe the line between pantomime and play.

Unfortunately I just didn’t think any of the main cast were particularly strong, with the exceptions of Kerry Howard’s Lucy, Caroline Quentin’s Mrs Malaprop, and Peter Forbes’ Anthony Absolute. I found myself longing for their characters to come back on stage and a bit bored when they weren’t. We get the usual restoration comedy tropes of the period – mistaken identities and the wrong letters being delivered to the wrong people – and I enjoyed the fact the writers decided to signpost this to the audience by having Lucy break the fourth wall and explain that this sort of thing always happens in these plays. There are some nice comic moments, when Jack Absolute disguises himself as the oily northern fixer, Dudley, who keeps coming on stage and interfering with his deception. And there are some heartfelt moments of intimacy too, with the relationship between Lucy and Dudley growing over their hidden duck game, making it all the more poignant when we watch it break down through no fault of Dudley.

But there is, more than anything else, an overwhelming feeling of nothing much happening – at least nothing significant. The plot goes in exactly the direction you would expect – and even when we hear that Jack Absolute’s plane has gone down and that he hasn’t survived, the play doesn’t really have anywhere to go and the ending feels very low energy and flat. I do think that is sort of the theme throughout the play, often only rescued by the ridiculousness of Mrs Malaprop and her malapropisms (mis-speaking a word that sounds like another word), which usually serves as a cheap laugh to add some comedy into the moment, but it is often a very effective technique.