Treats

Synopsis

Comedy about a '70s London love triangle. Dave has returned home. The locks have been changed. His furniture's gone and Anne is living with another man. And so the epic love-triangle begins...Christopher Hampton's play brings together loyalty and desire, revenge and betrayal in a darkly comic mix. Can love conquer all or is 'real life' just too powerful.

Our Review:

9 March 2007

As a comedy of modern sexual mores in a triangular arrangement, Christopher Hampton’s Treats bears comparison with Noel Coward’s Design for Living or Patrick Marber’s Closer. Historically, it bisects both plays, dating from 1976 but never really punching its weight in either the playwright’s oeuvre or the public esteem.

Laurence Boswell’s production is a bit of a discovery and has taken me by surprise on several counts. Billie Piper is really rather good as the assailed and mixed-up Ann, the character Hampton conceived as a reaction to Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House (a play he translated in the early 1970s): she goes out, slams the door, but comes back.

And in slightly adjusting his text to allow the ghastly, coke-snorting, womanising journalist Dave – he’s “had” 42 women during his two years of bullying and despising Ann - to be on leave from duty in Basra rather than Beirut (staying in the Dorchester, not the Savoy), Ham...

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Latest User Review

john bingham - 19 November 2007:

The very title raises expectations and for me it was a disappointing treat. Unlike The Dorchester, now showing at the Jermyn Street theatre. Think of The Producers and here’s another romp through Hitler’s Germaneee. Except that it all takes place within one room of London’s Dorchester Hotel during the war and the Nazis have already goosestepped their way down Whitehall. Hitler admirers the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are preparing themselves to become titular heads of state, although beneath the preening lurks insecurity. German foreign minister Von Ribbentrop tells them it would be unwise to take their incontinent dog for a quick walkies down Park Lane. Are they under house (hotel) arrest? And what is the darling of theatreland, Noel Coward, really up to as he breaks off from his sniping bon mots to lock the waiter in a cupboard? Yes, it’s all a farce played out with crispness of a Heil Hitler salute which only comes to a stutter when the waiter turns out to be B-b-b-bertie, King George VI, disguised in nothing more than a detachable Hitler moustache, trying to thwart his brother’s ambitions. Tim Faulkner gives a nicely understated, louche performance as the Duke of Windsor, who neither looks (nor thankfully sounds like) Edward Fox. Toni Kanal as Wallis alternates between vamp and vampire as she demands £20m as the price for her loyalty to the Third Reich. Noel (Matthew Phillips) is the manipulative power behind the throne, by turns beguilingly camp and menacing, with Bertie (Alec Walters) shedding his stutter along with the moustache as events reach their denouement. But not before Matthew Wynn (Ribbentrop) gives one of the most surreal performances of the evening. Picture ‘pub landlord’ Al Murray in jackboots lying on a couch playing Vivienne Lee in Gone with the Wind with a Teutonic/southern belle accent. A couple of (mercifully brief) scenes are just too silly, even for a farce (brolly fencing and the Duke of Windsor appearing with bagpipes). Scrap these and The Dorchester deserves a showing beyond ‘the fringe’ of Jermyn Street’s small basement venue. John Bingham ...

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