Rules For Living

Sam Holcroft’s comedy is without doubt born of the same history as any farce, a shared history of slapstick, slammed doors and slam dunk one liners. That’s not a criticism, far from it, when that kind of comedy is written well it’s a winning genre – depending of course on the quality of the cast. Okay, it might seem at the start rather old fashioned, it may take a while to set up the situations and the characters, and a while for the audience to grasp the card game rules by which those characters have to play, but once you’re in there the thing races along at quite a pace, and particularly after the interval where the whispers from the audience are agreeable, enjoyable but yes, rather old fashioned.

Then after the first half we’re back and the whole thing kicks off and it’s a Christmas Day that reminds so many of us how difficult it is when an entire family is subjected to enforced socialisation and jollity. The cast are excellent, each character declining in their own way into the final emotional chaos as the rules of the game become ever increasingly complicated. Laura Rogers plays a finely fragile drunk struggling to make sense of her marriage to Ed Hughes’s Adam, a man so disappointed with his life that he hides behind silly voices. Jolyon Coy is the lost boy unable to face the truth that he too is leading a disappointing life and has to lie to one and all and even to himself and is caught up in a less than ideal relationship with the very needy Carrie who is constantly in need of affirmation and laughs, Carlyss Peer is truly delightful in the role.

Paul Shelley is the only one excused because he has been ill and it turns out has had a stroke, or at least that is how it seems until grinning and leering Paul Shelley as the father disgraces himself and the truth about his philandering past is revealed. And at the heart of the mayhem is the obsessive compulsive Edith, mother and wife to this truly hideous ensemble of damaged souls, self medicating and dusting her way through the crisis until she finally cracks and the entire ensemble degenerate into one unholy fight, only to be brought back down to earth by the teenage daughter Emma who until the last moment has been holed up in a bedroom. Jane Booker is quite brilliant as Edith, brittle, controlling, crazy and finally cracking and going off the rails herself in a display of beautifully played madness.

Yes old fashioned but so well honed, so beautifully played and choreographed that it makes for a delightfully refreshing night of theatre.

17 October

Theatre Royal Brighton

Andrew Kay

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