“An elaborate life support system for the preservation of bad jokes” - this is one way of looking at Forty Years On, according to its author, Alan Bennett, writing in the wryly self-deprecating style that has made him a national treasure. Another way to look at it is as a state-of-the-nation play, commenting on the disintegrating United Kingdom of 1968 (the year it premiered). You can see, on both counts, why Daniel Evans has chosen it for his first production as the new artistic director of Chichester Festival theatre. Almost 50 years on, though, both jokes and comments feel distantly nostalgic - their ironies do resonate with our present but, on press night anyway, too feebly.
We are in Albion House, an English public school, in 1968 (Lez Brotherston’s gothic design impresses, but its central entrance inconveniences the staging). An end-of-year assembly also marks the end of the headmaster’s career, whose opening speech reflects on his own schooldays at the same institution, back in 1918(Richard Wilson, appropriately crusty and dyspeptic). A school play accompanies prayers and speeches. This play within the play covers two timescales, 1900-1939 and 1939-45, with their two world wars, via a non-sequential series of parodic vignettes of the privileged classes (backed by slides, videos and excerpts from news broadcasts spoken to doo-wop a cappella). Created by a younger master, radically sporting silk handkerchief and suede shoes, it includes a “farrago of libel, blasphemy and perversion” and is frequently interrupted by the 1968 present of misbehaving schoolboys and headmasterly objections.
To this already complex, quasi revue-style structure, Evans and musical director Tom Brady insert additional musical numbers. While these demonstrate the considerable skills of the excellent 52-strong, “schoolboy” community ensemble, they exaggerate the play’s fragmentations and unbalance its playful, fantastical qualities.
However, Bennett’s dry and punning humour is well served by the company, especially Jenny Galloway as Matron/Moggie (impeccable comic tone and timing for good and bad jokes alike) and Danny Lee Wynter’s parodies of upper crustness.
Overall, a good effort, but...
