Review: The Lottery of Love at the Orange Tree Theatre

4.5 STARS, March 30 – May 1. For lovers of rom-coms and Jane Austen coquetery, the Lottery of Love at the Orange Tree, Richmond until May 13 is a brilliant night’s entertainment. Con Crowley reviews

Helen Maybanks

Keir Charles & Claire Lams

Artistic Director Paul Miller has blown the dust off an adaption by novelist John Fowles of a classic French comedy by the 18th century playwright Pierre Marivaux.

Remarkably, this clever English twist by the author of a French Lieutenant’s Woman, has never been performed before and is the result of a collaboration between Fowles and Peter Hall of the National Theatre in the early 1980s.

Le Jeu de L’Amour et du Hassard was first performed in Paris in 1730 by Comédie-Italienne , but the Orange Tree version has been transported across the Channel to the Regency England of Jane Austen.

It is a story of mistaken identity and romantic high jinks and examines what happens when you start toying with love by mixing up the social status of the players and tempting fate.

Sylvia, the priggish daughter of the high bred Mr Morgan, played by Dorothea Myer-Bennett swaps places with her maid servant to discover the true worth of the man she is engaged to marry, but has never met.

Helen Maybanks

Keir Charles & Ashley Zhangazha

However, her gallant suitor Richard, played by Ashley Zhangazha, has exactly the same idea and swaps with his man servant. Unbeknown to both of them Sylvia’s father, played by Pip Donaghy, and haughty brother, played wonderfully by Tam Williams, are in on the game and take great delight in the sport.

Switching the roles of servants with their masters makes for great comedy as they both awkwardly try to act each other’s part. Not least Keir Charles’ larger than life Brass (“rhymes with arse!”), who he plays as a cross between Jack Sparrow and Norman Wisdom. He struts and stumbles his way through the performance as he struggles to contain his passion for the cheeky maid Louisa (Claire Lams) who he thinks is way above his station.

All in all a great night of teasing sexual games and bawdy humour performed brilliantly by the cast who act out “a fight to the death between common sense and love.”