Rookery Nook (Theatre by the Lake, Keswick)

This latest instalment in Theatre by the Lake’s ongoing ‘accidental history of farce’, already in recent years taking in plays from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 80s, takes the story right back to the 1920s.

Ben Travers’ Rookery Nook is getting on for ninety years old, written and performed by genuine Victorians, something indicated early on by the discovery that its stock funny foreigner is a ‘Prussian’. The initial set-up is to modern eyes bewilderingly slight, even for farce – ingénue Rhoda Marley is thrown out of her house one night by her angry step-father (the Prussian) for eating wurtleberries.

She ends up, in her pyjamas, at the borrowed house of newlywed Gerald Popkiss, a young man who is visiting his in-laws the Twines. She cannot possibly leave without causing a scandal unless she has a dress to wear. Gerald’s cousin Clive takes a shine to her, and the pair attempt to get Rhoda some clothes, firstly from the Twines and then from her own home.

Meanwhile, Rhoda has been spotted by the local help Mrs Leverett, and Gerald’s wife is summoned
to the scene. Clothes are eventually exchanged with an obliging local selling flags for the lifeboats, and when Gerald’s wife turns up she does indeed find a scantily-clad woman in his bedroom, if not the one she was intended to find. However, Rhoda turns up, her explanation is accepted, and the play ends happily with marital harmony restored and Rhoda and Clive paired up too.

The plot lacks the fizzing complexity of the best farces, and director Ian Forrest wisely emphasises the opportunities for comic physical caricature.

This is where the production triumphs, with images still fresh in the mind’s eye: Laura Cox’s goggle-eyed Mrs Leverett looming at an impossible angle over a hapless Gerald, Chris Hannon’s Harold Twine absent-mindedly chewing his boater, Katie Hayes as his termagant wife Gertrude striking a pose in her marigolds with the air of someone about to perform an unpleasant surgical examination.

Bryn Holding and Matthew Vaughan as Clive and Gerald, the two young men at the centre of the action, have a raffish comic rapport and Cate Cammack’s Rhoda embodies a slightly ditzy chastity, too busy cringing with embarrassment for there to be anything suggestive about her presence.

The energy is high, and the pacing is sure-footed even on first night. A postcard from a time when farce kept its trousers on, engagingly played, guaranteed to deliver laughs throughout its long summer run.

Rookery Nook runs at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick until 5 November.