Three Men in a Boat is the Rose Theatre Kingston’s new theatrical adaptation of the much-loved Victorian comic novel of the same name by Jerome K. Jerome. The play is written by Al Smith with songs by Grant Olding, celebrated for his work on ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’.
OUR VERDICT
Helen Murray
You can see why the Rose Theatre team chose to stage this classic comedy, given that the story begins in Kingston-upon-Thames.
The three men, Jerome, George, Harris and a fox terrier, Montmorency, set off to row a skiff upstream to Oxford.
Jerome originally conceived it as a semi-serious travel guide, until the comedy took over. We delight in the typically male unpreparedness and incompetence, their mishaps and misfortunes, their barmy anecdotes and banter.
The book has survived in our affections because of its lightness, like P G Wodehouse or Morecambe & Wise; it is a masterpiece of comic froth.
But in this theatre version, the author has sought to introduce some darkness: Harris has a fiancée about whom he is curiously ambivalent after an 11-year engagement. The fact that Harris is played by a female actor, Bronté Barbé, may have something to do with this.
There is jealousy between Jerome and George over Harris’s choice of best man, suggesting perhaps some unacknowledged feelings.
George, rather than being an indolent bank clerk in the City, is here a medical doctor (which allows for a good joke when he subjects Harris to a chest examination).
Helen Murray
More surprisingly, we learn that George is no care-free bachelor but is instead a grieving widower. None of this appears in the book.
Again, you can imagine why they have done this, to make the play say something more profound about male relationships.
Yet somehow these changes feel tonally wrong.
Helen Murray
The best moments in the play are when the characters let rip with anarchic scenes of surreal comic absurdity, clambering over seats and flinging props into the audience.
In particular, the last scene before the interval, when they are attacked by a bevy (or is it a lamentation?) of swans is a total riot.
Richard David-Caine as George, stands out as a comic talent, no doubt honed from being part of the Beeb’s Horrible History team. Montmorency the dog, brilliantly puppeteered by Calum Donald-Bruce, steals the show and gets most of the laughs.
Although the biggest roar of the night came from a faulty prop, which required an on-stage intervention from the ASM and some smart improv from the cast.
Everyone loves ‘a play that goes wrong’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep this gag in future productions.
As a longstanding fan of the original novel, I really wanted to love this show and perhaps my expectations were always too high. I found the comic songs were entertaining, but not especially memorable.
The gags were good, but not side-splittingly so.
That said, the audience ate it up with a big spoon, especially the lady sitting in front of me, who was either the playwright’s mother or had not been let out of the house in a while.
While the play superbly demonstrates the versatility of the Rose Theatre stage, with its impressive concentric turntable, moving scenery and trapdoors, I couldn’t help feeling that the play would do much better as an immersive experience in a much smaller theatre, where the audience emerges covered in swan feathers, drenched with fake river water and laughing themselves silly.
