See How They Run

Synopsis

Farcical goings-on at Merton-cum-Middlewick vicarage. What happens when a vicar goes away, leaving his ex-actress wife to entertain a former colleague who has to dress up in her husband's clothes, and they're spotted by a nosy parishioner who reads too much into what she sees? And when the wife's uncle, a bishop, mistakes the colleague for her husband, and an escaped prisoner breaks into the house and also dresses up as a reverend, will the real vicar be able to disentagle fact from farce on his return?

Our Review:

30 June 2006

“Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars!” There are vicars ’ere, there and everywhere, as well as an escaped German prisoner, a bendy-limbed spinster who has been hitting the sherry and an innocent housemaid who is accused of being an accelerator before the fact. If none of this strikes you as funny, then you shall go in peace my child and may God have mercy on your soul.

In my book, See How They Run by Philip King, first performed in 1944 and gloriously revived at the Duchess by Douglas Hodge (taking time out from playing an old misery guts, Titus Andronicus, at the Globe in Southwark), is probably the high point of British farce between Ben Travers and Ray Cooney, and certainly the funniest play in the language.

See How They Run is rooted in all sorts of very British fears such as those we harbour of foreigners, emotional truth and the word of God. The hapless country vicar of Merton-cum-Middlewic...

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Latest User Review

82.69.1.188) - 28 October 2006:

Loved it! Laughed till the tears rolled down my face....

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