Keeping up with expectations

Theatre
Keeping Up Appearances
Manoel Theatre

There was a time when people used to look forward to sitting down in their living rooms, ignore the fraying edges of the armchairs and sofas or their mismatched cushions, grab a mug of tea and focus on their TV screens for half an hour of English village humour, with candlelit suppers and Royal Doulton china with hand-painted periwinkles, to have a good chuckle over one woman’s mission to climb the social ladder to the very top.

Mellow Drama’s attempt at recreating Roy Clark’s hit BBC social comedy Keeping Up Appearances on stage at the Manoel Theatre last weekend was much anticipated and played to full houses, however, it left me feeling rather dissatisfied.

The script itself seemed to lack the type of plot one usually associated with the series while the setting of the piece simply didn’t translate well to the stage. There were several elements which were synonymous with the series’ original styling which were largely absent – Hyacinth’s kitchen and drawing room, for instance, were swapped for the impersonality of the village hall while the contrast achieved by contrasting her surroundings with those of her sister Daisy’s was also lost.

One of the major drawbacks of putting up a production like this is that the script does not exist beyond the performer. Unlike stage plays which are written with a character type in mind, TV scripts are much harder to reverse to theatre pieces because every often the writers generate material with a specific actor in mind and this is where the notion of typecasting sets in. The original cast of Keeping Up Appearances is very firmly fixed in people’s minds as the characters who made the show work and this creates a situation where audience expectation is high and unrealistic and to be honest, makes rather unfair demands on the stage actors portraying these characters. It must have been very hard for director Steve Casaletto as well as the performers themselves to deal with this problem, and on the whole, it was a commendable effort.

Marylou Coppini starred in the main role as Hyacinth Bucket and gave a very good performance which also served to anchor the other cast members together and kept the pace from faltering too much. Her interpretation of Hyacinth was strong enough to sustain the audience’s suspension of disbelief, as were those of Vanessa Attard and Isabel Warrington, who played her two sisters, Daisy and Rose respectively. The comic timing of all three was pleasant and slick and theirs were the portrayals to which the audience was most receptive. Jean Pierre Agius’s Emmet and Louiselle Vassallo’s Elizabeth were a solid if rather bland brother and sister duo whom Hyacinth likes to lord it over.

I felt that there was perhaps too great an exertion to imitate the originals on everybody’s part, and in the case of some characters, this didn’t work so well. James Calvert’s Onslow was indeed, rather non-committal, and coupled with the fact that he and the characters of Rose and Daisy were completely plucked away from their house on the row, felt rather odd.

The first act was better paced than the second, with a slightly clearer direction and introduction of the characters – one of which – Marc Cabourdin, as Hyacinth’s shy and highly-strung new neighbour who is encouraged to audition for a part in the play that Emmet was directing at the village hall, worked very well because he was a completely new character. From the long second act onwards, the script became rather convoluted and hard to follow and introduced another new character very late in the piece – actress Jo Caruana, who played the stock character Hyacinth is always trying to impress but fails miserably to do so, often with rather comic consequences. One truly funny element was the physical comedy provided by Martin Azzopardi’s cameo role as the ever-silent but very naughty “daddy” – Hyacinth’s father, who is always trying something (or someone) new.

Although Keeping Up Appearances did not quite manage to fulfil the expectations set up by that post-news time slot, it did provide the audience with pleasant, light entertainment – not quite a bone-china teacup, but certainly a safe beaker.