“From end to end I’ve searched the land looking for a place where England is still England.” So says Lady Rumpers, not a present-day Brexiter but a disgruntled aristocrat from Alan Bennett’s 1973 home counties farce.
If this play is a snapshot of bygone Britishness, with Lady Rumpers’ post-imperial delusions of grandeur, how does it speak to us today? At once like an overfamiliar 1970s sitcom – one that buzzes in the background, often on mute, forever on repeat – and an anthropological curiosity that reveals, to horrified fascination, what we found funny then and how far we have come since.
Translated from its Latin as “You shall have the body”, Habeas Corpus does indeed circle around matters of the flesh. There is a doctor with wandering hands, Arthur Wicksteed (Jasper Britton), a flat-chested spinster (Kirsty Besterman), a door-to-door salesman (Abdul Salis) and a sexually hungry vicar called Canon Throbbing (Matthew Cottle). There is also a blizzard of breast jokes that serve as a reminder that in the 1970s, male playwrights found women’s breasts very, very funny.
A farce without the revolving doors, there are flecks of saucy seaside postcard humour mixed with Restoration-style comedy. Illicit desires among these bed-hopping types of Hove, East Sussex, are expressed though Benny Hill trouserlessness and Carry On innuendo. There is even an upper-class equivalent of Barbara Windsor in the foxy blonde, Felicity Rumpers (Katie Bernstein), and a Hattie Jacques sort in the sexually domineering battle-axe Muriel Wicksteed (Catherine Russell).
Under Patrick Marber’s direction, the cast runs on and off an almost bare stage, with only a coffin as a central prop, which speaks to the play’s spurious ruminations on death, love and some very British reflections on the flesh: the body is either a cesspit of self-loathing or a site of dirty carnal delirium. We remain uncertain if these philosophical musings are part of the play’s irony or in earnest.
In fact, there is a confusing sense of a farce written by Bennett with what seems to be a degree of irony – a sending up of the genre itself, perhaps – and now acted with an extra layer of contemporary irony. This double perspective leaves us slightly cross-eyed. And while the other actors play it purely for comedy, all very energetically, Britton seems, heroically, to be channelling his inner Shakespearean, which adds a fruity twist.
Because this is Bennett, even in a minor key, there is neat word play, amusing one-liners and lots of retro smut, from the bottleneck of breast jokes to the punning names. It is not that the jokes about big women, little men, big breasts and little breasts offend (although one throwaway line about a father putting his hands down his daughter’s top brings biliousness). The bigger crime here is that it is all so tragically unfunny: “Stand up,” says a tall man. “I am standing up,” says the shorter one. Sigh. “We’re into injury time now,” comments the cleaning lady in the second half, and we feel the spectator fatigue.
On a more serious note, its retrograde Britishness feels loaded now: is this a full-circle audit of the national character before we had had time to assimilate into our new EU identities? A nostalgic clasping or a sending up? When it was initially staged on Broadway, Habeas Corpus closed in under three months. Perhaps the Americans didn’t enjoy the jokes as much as we did, and maybe, in these intervening decades, we have not only become more European but more American too.
Habeas Corpus is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 27 February.
