CAN’T PAY, WON’T PAY

For a play written almost 50 years ago Dario Fo’s farce is as poignant as ever, if not more so, and especially here in post brexit Britain. With soaring inflation, police corruption and political unrest it could sit as well in contemporary Bracknell as in Bologna.

Fo’s Marxist thread is equally as exposed as that of exploitative industrialists and retailers and his love of farce serves this breakneck story well as the principal characters get deeper and deeper into this story of intrigue and deception.

Sascha Cooper has done a fine job in powering this production forward and has not abandoned the humour along the way, always Fo’s intention to use comedy to deliver strong political concepts, the evening is packed with laughs. And here cast turn in some fine comedy too. Toni, played by Fenia Gianni is marvellous, her delivery sharp and here facial expressions priceless. The deeper in she gets the funnier she becomes as the level of crazy invention and lie telling increases in absurdity.

Her friend Maggie, played by Sarah Widdas, is the perfect foil for this, hapless and hopeless she gets dragged along by Toni and become complicit in the lunacy.

Toni’s husband Giovanni is the moral compass of the piece, or is he, faced by the spiralling gloom of his world, rising prices, rebellion and redundancy how can he balance what he believes in with what is happening to him. Jon Terry does this with skill and conviction, totally believable as a character even when things get to be truly bizarre and friend and husband of Maggie Lui, played by Philip Willett, is the balance to his activist nature, accepting bordering on complacent about the world round him.

Into all this comes a police sergeant played with comic skill by John Newcombe, a bumbling buffoon of a person of the law out of his depth when faced by yarn spinning Toni. And Newcombe returns soon after as the inspector with just the addition of a peaked hat and a moustache. Finally he returns as Toni’s stopped father who delivers the reveal and releases the comic denouement.

This production is well conceived and totally entertaining but not at the loss of the political message of a world where food prices and rent are spiralling upwards, jobs and wages disappearing and the future is looking bleak… sound familiar? You bet it does.

Andrew Kay

The Lantern Theatre

25 June

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