Theater Review—

‘Mrs Markham’ A Strong Season Opener For Town Players

By Julie Stern

The late Evelyne Thomas, who reigned as doyenne of Newtown’s Town Players,  was famous for her love of British farce,  and so of course it was she who directed the last two productions of Ray Cooney and John Chapmans’  Move Over Mrs Markham, a classic example of the genre. Now, at a time when a memory garden with weatherproof benches has been planted in front of the theater in her honor, the company has chosen to open this, their 75th season, with a reprisal of the same silly, funny,  preposterous comedy.

Shawn Fife’s set, capturing the interior of a London flat — living room, bedroom, and doors to various outer rooms — is at the heart of the plot. Located on the top floor of the building where children’s book publishers Lodge and Markham have their ground floor offices, it is coveted by an assortment of characters looking for a setting for their romantic trysts.

On an evening when stodgy Philip Markham and his wife, Joanna, have plans to attend a publishers’ dinner, Philip has agreed to lend the apartment to his randy partner, Henry Lodge, for an assignation with a young secretary, whom he knows only from telephone conversations. What neither of them know is that Joanna Markham has made a similar promise to Lodge’s wife, Linda, who is out to get even with her philandering husband by having a fling with a man named Walter, who wooed her with passionate love letters.

Meanwhile, the Markhams’s interior decorator, Alistair Spenlow, is planning to use the place to hook up with Sylvie, the European maid.

Complications ensue. Philip finds a middle page of Linda’s love letter and mistakenly assumes it was sent to his wife. In response to his angry accusations,  Joanna — who has always been faithful — vows to seduce Alistair. Into the mix arrives Miss Olive Harriet Smythe, an eccentric, puritanical, and extremely successful author of children’s books, who announces that she has left her publisher and wants to come over to Lodge and Markham, because her previous publisher was printing pornography and she didn’t want to be involved with immoral people.

Realizing that acquiring Miss Smythe as a client would be the financial equivalent of landing J K Rowling, Joanna must manage the ménage, frantically explaining the presence of each new intruder who arrives with libidinous thoughts and a bottle of champagne.

Farce is probably the most demanding form of theater in terms of what it requires of its actors, and director Karina Ramsey has done a good job of keeping her cast moving, especially as the action heats up and the misunderstandings and mistaken identities multiply. 

Angela Bowman and Nick Kaye as the Markhams,  Alena Cybart-Persenaire and Richard Warren as the Lodges, and Walker LaVardera as Alistair, Jennifer Gantwerker in the dual roles of Sylvie the maid and Miss Wilkinson (Henry Lodge’s bit of fluff), and Doug Schlicher as Walter all keep the la ronde spinning very nicely, giving the audience plenty to laugh at.

Pam Meister  has fun with the role of the addle brained dingbat, Olive Smythe.

The one quibble that I had with this production has to do with the matter of accents. With the exception of Olive Smythe (who was meant to be ridiculous anyhow), the women in the show tended to speak in their native American voice, which worked just fine. They conveyed exasperation, indignation, perturbation, and all the other emotions on which farce operates.

The men, meanwhile, used a variety of English accents, which all seemed to come from different parts of the country, and which clashed with the Connecticut twang of the wives. I think it might have been easier if they had all spoken naturally,  in a common language.

Still that is only a minor complaint, and it did not detract from the audience’s obvious enjoyment of the show.  What Jack Lemon and Shirley MacLaine  made wistful and moving in their 1950s fifties movie The Apartment, this farce is purely for laughs, and with this production, it is clear that Evelyne’s spirit still graces the boards of the Little Theatre.