Jingo: A Farce of War

Synopsis

Singapore 1942. Glamorous society girl Gwendoline finds herself at the Raffles Hotel with her latest husband - whom she married in a hurry after running up a large hotel bill in Bombay. But when she bumps into her former husband Ian, a dashing major with the Royal Engineers, she begins to wonder if she was a little hasty in divorcing him. Meanwhile, Brigadier Percy is also pursuing her - now his wife has been evacuated. And to top it all off, Japanese troops are approaching and room service keeps running out of champagne... Unperformed since its 1975 Royal Shakespeare Company premiere, Jingo is a hilarious exploration of relationships and patriotism, set among the privileged expatriate community of Malaya in the days before the largest British surrender of the Second World War.

Latest User Review

Quentin - 3 April 2008:

An utterly bizarre evening. "Jingo" doesn't seem quite sure what it wants to be: one minute it's a Coward-esque period piece with caustic one liners, next a harrowing indictment of war and then a crass farce with a middle aged man begging to be spanked on his bottom! The shifts of tone are utterly bewildering and one senses that the play needs to be directed by more assured hands for it to make any kind of coherent sense. Susannah Harker stands out as a delightfully bitchy army wife, but Peter Sandys-Clark as her husband is woefully miscast. He looks about seventeen and their scenes together look rather like a mother and child. He's also very uncomfortable in the moments requring physical comedy and is generally out of his depth. The part requires someone like James Fleet to pull it off and it's yet another disconcerting element in among a whole evening of them. The two older actors - Paul Mooney and Roger Braban - seemed under-rehearsed and unconfident, but Anthony Howell made a fine and convincing period officer. Ultimately the problems lie with a script that is so schizophrenic the audience were on the whole left baffled and confused. ...

Read more and add your own review