January 17, 1998: Pinero, The Magistrate
Savoy (matinee)
The ugliest fit-up in London is what the refurbished interior of the Savoy ought to be called, a tasteless combination of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, with patterned floor carpets and reddish-tan gilt wallpaper with large green balls the size of grapefruit in clusters painted into the upper corners. Fortunately, the lights do go down and then open on a large stage well-equipped with a double revolve which can be run simultaneously in opposite directions.
This is the Chichester Festival production of Pinero’s farce, with the impeccable Ian Richardson as Aeneas Posket, magistrate of Mulberry Police Court. His monumental propriety as a lawgiver is wonderfully illustrated in a wordless opening sequence in which, on the outer revolve, Posket comes slowly into view, behind him a sculptor and a huge rough stone; Posket takes up a series of heroic poses, and then changes his mind just as the sculptor’s hammer and chisel are about to fall. He at length settles on the most pompous choice of all, the book of laws held high in his left hand while his right arm extends down, finger pointed, to admonish a presumed criminal. And so the venerable, punctiliously correct Posket is set up for the fall that inexorably occurs.
Pinero’s three-act farce demonstrating how the mighty can — and should — fall has been revived innumerable times, I would suppose. Its machinery creaks and groans fairly audibly, and yet it plays. Whereas in French farce the animal urges of civilized human beings are demonstrated and thwarted, at length, British farce, in this period at least, is typically about the thwarting of pretense at propriety. Spurious dignity is inevitably in for a come-uppance, or -downance, at the hands of Pinero when in a farcical mood. As long as the actors take their characters seriously, do not take the audience into their confidence to the effect that this is only a joke, and keep things going at an acceptably brisk pace, all goes well. As in this well-placed, spirited, and well acted production.
The first act is a bit tedious, but a necessary set-up for the scene in the Hotel des Princes in Act II, where reputations are threatened and even life itself becomes precarious, what with Captain Vale’s experience in a rainstorm on a balcony and then above on the roof of the hotel, from which he falls through the chimney into the very room from which his companion Colonel Lukyn has asked him tactfully to leave momentarily in order to accommodate the needs of Posket’s wife and her sister, who are looking to protect the falsehood Posket’s wife has told in order to disguise the true age (19) of her socially precocious son Cis Farrington. Cis himself meanwhile has lured the naive Posket to this very place, and when they in turn rush out onto the same balcony to avoid a police raid, they fall through the glass roof of the kitchen and run away, pursued as far as Kilburn by the police, with predictable insult to Posket’s d