It is the curse of children's TV presenters that they will for ever be associated with their early work. So it is with Derek Griffiths, who has an illustrious string of theatrical credits to his name – yet, for theatre-goers of a certain age, he will always be the boggle-eyed chap with extraordinarily long fingers from Play School. Those who principally remember Griffiths interacting with soft toys and gazing through the round window may be shocked to find him transformed into Molière's irascible old misery-guts Harpagon: a man so mean he will not give you the time of day (though he will lend it to you at an appropriate rate of interest).
Griffiths's pipe-cleaner frame is now topped by an expansive, gleaming pate, from which a few sparse wisps of hair hang like cobwebs. But he remains an adroit comedian with a fabulous sense of timing: he ruminates over the line "You can't trust the banks" to extract the biggest laugh of the evening and makes self-conscious fun of those spidery fingers, which at one point lodge in his peripheral vision and distract him like a dog chasing its tail.
Helena Kaut-Howson's production draws heavily on the play's commedia dell'arte archetypes – or, in other words, it features a lot of hyperactive prancing about. Helen Atkinson Wood is in imperious form as the lusty matchmaker Frosine, while Danny Lee Wynter makes a splendidly impecunious Cléante, despite having what appears to be a dead cat on his head. Ashley Martin-Davis's design has a rough-and-ready feel that conceives Harpagon's house as an unfinished restoration project covered in plaster dust – unless the set builders simply went off to buy materials and never came back.
