Bad taste, as this famous American comedy by Joseph Kesselring unfortunately reveals, is not what it used to be. Indeed, Arsenic and Old Lace, as Matthew Francis's slightly amusing but thin-blooded revival reminds us, no longer seems outrageous or even daring.
But when this pale-black farce triumphantly premiered in wartime London and New York, its popularity depended on its madcap shock-appeal. For Arsenic and Old Lace then seemed a triumph of immorality and lunacy, peopled with assorted crazies and more than one corpse. Now, it needs a shot in the vitals.
The heroines Abby and Martha, two sweet old spinsters, mad about religion, at first seem the acme of respectability. But it's they who spark the play's bizarre comedy. Although upstairs the spinsters have one nephew, mad Teddy, who imagines himself a long-dead President of the USA, and another, Mortimer, a lazy theatre critic, their status as pillars of the community is impeccable. But then Mortimer discovers a corpse in a chest and his aunts are exposed as serial murderers, who have poisoned a dozen lonely, old men, burying them in the cellar, after tasteful religious services.
"I do think Martha and I have the right to our own little secrets," Thelma
Barlow's Abby complains when the horrified Mortimer confronts her. The line ought to be dispatched with selfrighteous indignation and raise a big laugh, since it exposes the sisters' unsuspected craziness.
But Miss Barlow, all lace, honey and simpers, and that brilliant creator of comic eccentrics, a dainty, decorous Marcia Warren, underplay the old girls' lunacy and nonchalant amorality. Even when loitering again on the verge of murder, with fatal elderberry wine, they incarnate bland suburbia.
A similar, even stronger reservation applies to Stephen Tompkinson's Mortimer, the role immortalised with high elegance by Cary Grant on film. The spiral of anxiety, amazement and panic to which Mortimer succumbs should charge the farce with quick-fire fun and lunacy. But Tompkinson never rises to high, frantic emotions. He merely oozes modest agitation.
Michael Richards, despite a sinister touch of Boris Karloff about him, doesn't have enough mad, threatening energy as Mortimer's long-lost, psychopathic brother who reappears with a corpse of his own to hide. Francis's production needs the smack and crack of highspeed, high definition farce if it's to work.
Booking to 4 April. Box office: 0870 901 3356
Arsenic And Old Lace
