Frivolous farce from John Lithgow's magistrate at the National Theatre

The Magistrate

National Theatre, running until Sunday 10^th February

A chorus of pin-striped, face-painted singers quick-step onto the stage. Any audience members innocently expecting a straight farce are catapulted into a play that intersperses Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1855 text with comic musical interludes, brilliantly blurring the line between vaudeville camp and tongue-in-cheek Victorian moralising.

The premise of the play is that the widowed Mrs Posket has lied to her second husband about her age, which has got her into difficulty: if she is only 31 (not her real age of 36), her son by her first marriage could not be 19. Having taken off 5 years from her own age, she must therefore take 5 off his, making him a remarkably horny, debauched 14 year old with an inappropriate penchant for gambling, smoking and sex. And so, hilarity ensues.

Except that hilarity is not always abundant. Pinero’s play feels somewhat dated, and some of the jokes are more obvious than Where’s Wally in a horde of sombre Victorian magistrates. The action is slow to get going, and until John Lithgow is able to let loose as his renegade stepson leads him astray, it is hard to find a character to whom you can really relate.

Lithgow brings a paradoxical modernity to his magistrate that makes his plight that of any contemporary husband who has been reluctantly convinced to break the rules, and must amusingly bluster his way through the consequences. But the other characters fail to break the confines of Pinero's time, and feel slightly rigid and antiquated. Nancy Caroll as Mrs Poskett does elicit some genuine emotion when deliberating her predicament, but her interactions with her son, Cis, inevitably fall into triviality because of Jonathan Coy’s superficial portrayal of a man in a boy’s skin. The acting is of course allowed to be melodramatic - this is a farce after all - but when there is little substance behind the melodrama, it feels prosaic and frivolous.

Katrina Lindsay’s set has a kind of graphic-novel style quirkiness that jars somewhat with the overall sense of a production trying to make you contemplate the state of our society as well as tickle your funny bones. In the NT's London Road, Lindsay's stylised, crude set complemented the Ipswich town it was depicting, but here it needs to be more classy - the scrawled descriptions across the top of each set and general wackiness simply distracts.

Having said that, The Magistrate does make for an enjoyable evening’s entertainment. And despite the criticism levelled against the chorus by some reviewers, I felt they actually enhanced the play. They provide unexpectedly satisfying snippets of song, written by Richard Sisson and Richard Stilgoe, which are in keeping with the farcical nature of Pinero's original but which bring it into the 21^st century with lyrics that provide some of the most comic moments of the night.

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