Three Men in a Boat

This is many a lad’s favourite school book. Craig Gilbert’s updated version includes many amusing theatrical moments and quaint asides to the audience but the telling of the yarn itself is forced. It begins slowly and clumsily and it is packed with a modern humour at odds with the charm of the late-Victorian original. The Jerome K Jerome character ‘J’ is made too abrasive. Often hectoring like a panto-Dame, he quite bullies the others and us into following the story. The bumbling, silly-arsed good humour is replaced with laddish slapstick. It’s still funny and even enjoyable but just not endearing.

Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, 3 March 2015

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