There’s something rather fascinating going on in Manchester: two early-20th-century plays are being reinvented in very different ways, with each approach reflecting different strands of contemporary British theatre. There is plenty of room in Manchester, and our theatre culture, for these and more.
At the newly opened Home, Walter Meierjohann brings a visual European edge to Simon Stephens’ The Funfair, a version of Odön von Horváth’s Kasimir and Karoline. Over at the Exchange, Paul Hunter and Told by an Idiot drive an exuberant physical theatre steam train through this 1922 spooky comedy about a group of travellers stranded on a desolate railway station, which is rumoured to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died in a tragic train accident years before.
The Ghost Train was actor and playwright Arnold Ridley’s only real writing success (he found fame in later life as Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army). Anachronisms abound in its social relationships and characterisations, with people wandering around saying things such as “all this is dashed queer”‚ and “look here, old chap”. Hunter cleverly plays on that creakiness, deliberately heightening it, while relying on the clockwork nature of the plotting to generate momentum.
Just as all is perhaps not quite what it appears at the station, so Hunter’s production never plays things straight. The uptight spinster, Miss Bourne, is played with comic aplomb by Javier Marzan in a performance that wittily plays on the fact that a man is acting as a woman. The mechanics of the theatre are laid bare, particularly in the superb opening sequence, in which Ridley’s stage directions are read out and the sounds of steam trains are recreated, Foley-style.
It’s a pity that the production then loses its nerve and opts for relentless jokiness. Instead of trying to genuinely reinvent an old pot-boiler, it uses the play as a vehicle for slapstick and physical comedy sequences – some more successful than others, and some as exhausting to watch as they must be to perform.
Despite an engaging cast, there are definite longueurs amid all the merry mayhem, and the comedy gets the upper hand at the expense of the supernatural. There is simply not enough tension or suspense to make the show gripping – although it does have a brilliantly inventive finale, in which Hunter and his game cast remind us of the sheer skill at work behind all the silliness.
• At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 20 June. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
