The Cabinet Minister

Menier Chocolate Factory, 04/10/24

Credit: Tristram Kenton

Final rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

This was a really strange evening at the theatre for me. It was as if I’d gone to watch a play in a different country in a foreign language, because with almost every joke the audience around me were lapping it up and laughing to extreme, meanwhile I was sat there wondering what was so funny. This play is a new adaptation of a Victorian farce from 1890 by Arthur Wing Pinero. To me, however, it felt like it was very much stuck in that time period and the comedy just didn’t land.

Nancy Carroll’s adaptation has the cast come on with musical instruments, and throughout they play short bursts of music and sing about events that have just unfolded on stage. This was a nice element, if a little jarring or forced at times. But it was the story itself that I thought also didn’t really work.

The wife of the Cabinet Minister, Lady Kitty Twombley, has run out of money after over-indulging in her extravagant tastes in fine interiors and lavish dresses. Instead, she has to enlist the help of some unscrupulous loan sharks in the form of Fanny and Bernard Lacklustre (Phoebe Fildes and Laurence Ubong Williams). It was these characters I found myself caring about the most, rather than the titular Cabinet Minister (Nicholas Rowe) who actually featured barely at all, and their array of children and cousins. In traditional farce style, characters hide, overhear, and manipulate information that sometimes backfires and leads to comic mishaps or misunderstandings. But even these moments didn’t have any sense of ‘in-jokes’ for the audience, as it all felt very forced.

The saving grace were the Macphails – two characters which I believe were new additions written by the adapter – who live at the castle where the second half of the action takes place. Dillie Keane’s elderly, brutish and unforgiving Scottish Lady Macphail was fun, as was Matthew Woodyatt’s bumbling and oblivious Colin Macphail, who was a bit too obsessed with his mother.

The set was simply fine. It was nothing to shout home about (and certainly not on the same level as The Baker’s Wife which I saw at the Menier a few weeks prior). The conclusion felt entirely predictable and to be honest unearned, with information about a government canal construction project only really mentioned right at the end, which led to the ultimate downfall of the main villain Bernard (or Cyngen, a name he adopts in an attempt to become a better social climber) Lacklustre. Some of the cast struggled to make an impact for me (Joe Edgar gave a very nervous and stilted performance as rich boy Brooke Twombley, and I found Sara Crowe as the Countess of Drumdurris also quite grating).

I was glad to have watched it, but ultimately this production greatly failed to live up to its hype (having had some extremely good reviews from newspaper theatre critics). It wasn’t really about the perils of being a cabinet minister at all (apart from a few gimmick jokes about how modern parliament is like a jungle) and instead a relatively basic portrait of the art of social climbing.