Bertie Wooster (Matthew Cavendish) has decided to put on a one-man show telling the story of a particular sequence of misadventures, but it isn’t long before he realises that this acting business isn’t as easy as it looks and he ropes in his long-suffering and unflappable butler Jeeves (Andrew Ashford) to assist him along with his Aunt Dahlia’s butler Seppings (Andrew Cullum). The tale Bertie wants to recount is the rather convoluted one told in P.G. Wodehouse’s “The Code of the Woosters” (1938) in which Aunt Dahlia sends Bertie on an errand to liberate an antique silver cow creamer from the clutches of Sir Watkyn Basset, owner of Totleigh Towers and the local magistrate.
The first of many very quick costume changes later, Aunt Dahlia appears on stage, played by Seppings who has “a remarkable talent for impersonation” – Cullum’s years as Solihull’s pantomime dame clearly weren’t wasted – and this begins a chain of both Seppings and Jeeves having to change ever more frantically back and forth between playing themselves and the other eight characters in Bertie’s story.
And what a story! Sir Watkyn’s drippy daughter Madeline is engaged to Bertie’s newt-obsessed pal Gussie until Gussie is caught in a compromising position with Sir Watkyn’s niece “Stiffy” (Sir Watkyn, Madeline, Gussie and Stiffy are all played by Jeeves). This is bad news for Bertie as he is “next in line” to marry Madeline, if ever she and Gussie call it off. Aware that Aunt Dahlia covets the cow creamer, Sir Watkyn engages the menacing Spode (Seppings) and Constable Oates (also Seppings) to protect it. Spode, the leader of a Fascist rabble known as the Black Shorts, gets ever taller as Bertie recounts the tale – this is as hilarious to watch as it is cleverly portrayed. A dark secret, known only to Jeeves, will later prove Spode’s undoing.
Meanwhile Stiffy is engaged to the local Curate, a lowly-paid individual and thus beneath her; Sir Watkyn will never consent. She hatches a plan to rehabilitate the Reverend: Bertie will steal the cow creamer but be caught in the act by her fiancé who will punch Bertie on the nose, return the artefact to its owner and be seen thenceforth as a hero. Bertie refuses but is blackmailed by Stiffy who has Gussie’s notebook which contains some forthright and uncomplimentary opinions of both Spode and Sir Watkyn.
Will Bertie have to marry Madeline? Will he end up in prison for stealing the cow creamer? Or indeed for stealing Constable Oates’s helmet and giving him a black eye? One way or another, things are starting to look bleak for him. He is in a real scrape.
Thankfully Jeeves is on hand with a brilliant idea. Bertie isn’t convinced, but Jeeves calmly reassures him: “I think it will be effective, sir”. It is, and normality – or what passes for it in the world of Bertie Wooster and friends – is soon restored. It’s only when we get to the end of this two-hour whirlwind of farce that we can reflect upon how much could have gone wrong. That it didn’t is of huge credit to the cast of three but also to Alex Marker for his ingenious set design (I really love the fireplace that metamorphoses into Bertie’s two-seater sports car) and to Denise Cleal for her work adapting the costumes to facilitate the lightning-quick changes. Magnets are the secret, apparently.
There are some serious points being made in the midst of all the silliness. Wodehouse wrote “Code of the Woosters” in 1938 as Fascism spread throughout Europe. The character of Spode is a thinly-veiled satire of Oswald Mosley whose Blackshirts were fighting (literally) for the Fascist cause on the streets of London and elsewhere. Spode may be a ridiculous figure, but what if a total buffoon with nasty far-right views were ever to come to power in real life…? I’ll leave that one there.
More subtly, there’s a lot of class politics going on here. Things only turn out right for Bertie, on the night as well as in the story he’s telling, because of the hard work put in by the “below stairs” characters Jeeves and Seppings. In the real world much of this effort would be largely invisible, but Wodehouse in his books and the Goodale Brothers in Perfect Nonsense bring it up the stairs and into the light. In the play, the theatre itself is used as the metaphor for this; the normally unseen “off-stage” tasks of shifting scenery, creating sound effects and even some of the costume changes are done under the glare of the lights for all to see – and with impeccable timing and precision.
“Laughter is the best medicine”, so the Reader’s Digest used to tell us, and at the end of a hard week I laughed for two hours solid and felt wonderful at the end. Perfect Nonsense is, well, perfect: for its wit, daftness, energy and brilliance it’s five stars from me.
Perfect Nonsense is a co-production of Chipping Norton Theatre and The Barn Theatre, Cirencester, and is on tour until May 31st – see jeevesandwooster.co.uk for details.
Reviewer - Ian Simpson
on - 7/2/20
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