The Royal Exchange's love affair with farce continues with a racy new translation of Goerges Feydou's French farce, Le Dindon. It is given a stylish production by Matthew Lloyd but, with the exception of a few glorious moments, is amusing rather than hilarious.
Things begin promisingly enough, the mousetrap set in lawyer Vatelin's bourgeois drawing room. His young wife, Lucienne, has been pursued by the lecherous Pontagnac, but is determined to remain faithful, saying she will only betray him if she has evidence of his infidelity to her. It arrives within minutes, in the shape of Gudrun, a snorting Viennese man-eater.
This first act works like clockwork, the absurdities of the situation given real edge by the merciless exposé of the real state of relations between men and women. But when the action moves to the Hotel Ultimus, where Lucienne goes to catch her husband in the act, the evening winds down rather than creating more tension and laughter. Instead of a nightmarish world, lives wrecked by comic disaster, we enter the cosy world of sitcom. The production often mistakes the frenetic for the genuinely farcical, the daffy for the authentically mad.
This may in part be due to Lloyd's decision to relocate the action from the late 19th century to modish 1950s Paris. It makes for a stylish evening, but the social mores don't quite gel. Would mid-20th-century Parisians really care so much about fidelity and divorce? There never seems quite enough at stake. And there are other oddities too. The fight scene is badly muffed, Ben Porter's Ernest Redillon owes more to his Wildean namesake than a trend-setting Parisian, and David Fielder's Vatelin is enormously self-possessed for a man supposedly having the worst day of his life.
Until August 11. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
