When We Are Married

Synopsis

Open to rave reviews at the Garrick Theatre, When We are Married has an all star cast including Maureen Lipman, Sam Kelly, Susie Blake, Rosemary Ashe, Michele Dotrice, David Horovitch,Simon Rouse and Roy Hudd.

Set in 1908, When we are Married is the story of three well-to-do West Yorkshire couples - the Parkers, Soppitts and Helliwells - married on the same day, at the same church, and by the same vicar 25 years ago.

The happy celebrations are brought to a sudden halt by a shocking revelation in JB Priestley’s When We are Married - these pillars of the community aren't quite as respectably married as they thought they were. As the home truths fly like confetti a young Chapel organist, a nosy meddlesome servant, a mad vicar, a reporter, a drunken photographer and a mysterious woman turn what should have been an idyllic day into an hilarious comedy of misunderstandings and mayhem.

The last West End outing for When We Are Married was at the Savoy Theatre in 1996, in a transfer from Chichester Festival Theatre. More recently, it was revived at West Yorkshire Playhouse last year.

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Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 28 October 2010

Forty years ago, producers Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliot launched their partnership with this imperishable J B Priestley play, and they’re back in harness for Christopher Luscombe’s cheerful, well paced, if rather strenuous, revival.

Actually, there are six or seven other producers involved, too, as well as the same originating theatre, the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford, where Peggy Mount as a gargantuan Clara Soppitt first terrorised a seraphic Hugh Lloyd in that 1969 production.

This time round, the Soppitts are a furious, beady-eyed Maureen Lipman and a walrus-moustached Sam Kelly, and the balance has shifted. Lipman’s Clara is much more shrewish and curiously given to angular, revue-style posturing, while Kelly’s Herbert Soppitt is goonish and abstract, coming into his kingdom as the worm who turns, gloriously pleased with himself.

The other two couples who think they might not have been spliced after all – the Alderman and M...

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 11 February 2011:

I felt like I’d gate-crashed a party. The rest of the audience was clapping entrances & exits and whooping & cheering lines and performances. The set looked like one of those period rooms in a museum – ‘Victorian Mill Owners Parlour, 1908′ – which had come alive with all of these people in period costumes. I’ve seen the play twice before – in 1988 with Patricia Routledge, Prunella Scales and Patricia Hayes (who had been the maid in the original production 50 years earlier) and 14 years ago with Alison Steadman and Dawn French – but this time it seemed much more of a creaky old warhorse, the stuff of rep and tours that rarely gets into the West End but was paying a visit and had brought its provincial audience with it. It’s not very typical of Priestly, a playwright much more fond of moralistic pieces like An Inspector Calls. It’s a simple comedy about three couple who, on their silver anniversaries, discover their marriages may not be legal. It’s well structured and there are some funny lines, but it now seems insubstantial stuff – though in all fairness it was two nights after my second look at the extraordinary Clybourne Park. The chief pleasure – and I mean this affectionately not patronisingly or critically – is seeing a bunch of old pro’s like Roy Hudd, Sam Kelly, Lynda Baron and Maureen Lipman letting their hair down and having some late career fun; in the end this proved a bit infectious and I warmed to it (though that may have been the third glass of wine in the interval!)....

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