Mates in Chelsea - Royal Court

Great fun, typical Mullarkey madness.

I’m quite tempted by this as I like several of the cast but then I double checked what else the writer had done and remembered that I pretty much hated Cannibals, The Wolf at the Door, Saint George and the Dragon and Pity soooooooo…….we shall see

If you don't like his work, you're probably not going to like Mates in Chelsea. If I really don't like a writer's work, it usually doesn't matter how much I like the cast, I won't go to the play. But I did find Mates in Chelsea kind of crazily exhilarating. 

I find his plays marmite, not just in the sense that one person will love him and another hate him, but even within myself, I love him AND I hate him lol.

HE can be mischievous, off-kilter, original and funny, but he can equally come off as superior, trivial, tryhard and unfunny.

If he was adapting King Lear, I'd expect everyone to have a cup of tea and an Eccles cake before committing torture to the Benny Hill theme tune.

In "Wolf from the door," at the Royal Court, Anna Chancellor's amoral posh character orchestrated a new English revolution against her own class, in which she got enigmatic wanderer, Calvin Demba, to cut off the head of a Tesco's manager to signal the start of a violent purge in which everyone in a position of authority bites it. It was original, sometimes funny, but it's sensibility was so distanced, I struggled to feel a single thing;

In "George and the Dragon" at the National, John Heffernan's time travelling George killed an ancient Dragon but struggled to kill more modern ones. The production was less trivial than Wolf, as it was loosely based on another more serious anchoring work, so I liked it more, but it was neither fish nor fowl, not funny enough to be Monty Python belly laughs, too trivial to be the critique of English apathy he wanted it to be;

In "Pity," at the Royal Court, Mullarkey's apocalyptic revolutionary sensibility went into overdrive as war after war after apocalyptic war drove everyone in a quaint little village to try to (comedically and violently) kill everyone else. For me, this was probably Mullarkey's most successful work of the three, as his rage, at the absurdity of cycles of violence as well as a general apathy towards any change in behaviour, was palpable, and his principal strategy, of using broad comedy to say serious things, actually worked.

"Mates in Chelsea" is a tale of two halves, for me. In the first half, Mullarkey does his most mainstream and successful comedy yet, channelling Ben Elton and Oscar Wilde, whereas in the second half, his need to belabour the comedy, and then tack on his apocalyptic revolutionary sensibility cuts the laughs to a trickle for extended periods.

I LOVED the first half, which felt like a hit TV sitcom about the outrageous upper classes.

George Fouracres gives a masterclass of a comic performance from first to last, so in the second half, I only really loved Fouracres's antics.

Some spoilers follow. . .

The setup has Laurie Kynaston's Tug Bungay, who has spent his fortune and borrowed up to the hilt, scheming on how to get his Mummy, Fenella Woolgar, to give him money so he doesn't have to sell his castle. He enlists the help of his best friend, Charlton Thrupp (George Fouracres) while trying to evade his nagging fiance, Finty Crossbell (Natalie Dew). . .

Kynaston is great as the whining antihero whose main goal is to remain bone idle, his scheming in the Ben Elton Blackadder vein. The character's brash baseness, his Wildean refusal to live according to convention, is the essence of the humour, and Kynaston's shamelessness is funny.

Fouracres's sidekick character, like Baldrick, is even funnier, as Fouracres possesses killer comic timing, and his character possesses Mullarkey's own encyclopedic knowledge of history which makes him still funnier: for example, his swift sudden surprising summation of "the Great Game," describing the antics of Great Britain in Afghanistan, had me in stitches.

Fenella Woolgar is also a gem as Bungay's rightwing mother, and she's a great foil to his machinations.

In the second half, after a promising opening where Fenella Woolgar plays live Badminton, the comedy goes dead for an extended period in which Fouracres is absent from the stage, and it's disappointing. But when Fouracres comes back, he's even funnier than before, and his setpiece tops the whole play for laughs.

And he even remains funny towards the end when he's asked to perform some of the more marmite elements of Mullarkey's malarkey.

All in all, the sitcom first half setup and Fouracres's hilarious performance made this marmite play 3 and a half stars of fun for me.

How disapppointing - & based on Steve's post above, I was expecting "curate's egg" opionions at least. Though I've yet to find a single review fro PN & I've already searched this morning expressly for those, so maybe it's a little early.

One star Times
One star Broadway World
One star The Stage
Two stars WOS
Two stars Guardian (not AA)
Four stars Telegraph

Oof - mainly one and two stars with an outlier 4 stars from the Telegraph so far.

I thought this was an interesting quote from the Time Out review:
'This comedy about the idle rich threatens you with a good time, but ultimately doesn’t have anything to say
Rory Mullarkey is one of those playwrights who theatre artistic directors clearly see something in that the rest of us haven’t.'

I wonder if he is absolutely brilliant at pitching ideas/first drafts and then something goes awry. I remember being really interested in the concept of Wolf from the Door, but then so disappointed in the play itself. And George and the Dragon sounded bold and like it might have something to say but then didn't (that was a long tedious watch.) Not sure what Pity was meant to be (I thought maybe sort of an Ionesco style absurd play possibly) - that was a confusing watch.

I was struck by that same quote from Time Out.  What HAS he got?  Is it nominative determinism? - Rory Mullarkey:  Roar and Larky sounds like he should be a great time.  I feel torn, as work that at first isn't understood may have something more to it and be proved brilliant/prescient in time.  But having endured 'Pity' and seen other works of his falling flat with most reviewers and audiences, I mainly feel annoyed for other playwrights who may have had a play that didn't quite work and found their phone never rang again. He seems to have all the luck.

Mullarkey did a good translation of "Remembrance Day," by Aleksey Scherbak, at the Royal Court, which I enjoyed, and I also really enjoyed "Coraline" at the Barbican, for which he wrote the book.

As to the Time Out Review referenced above ("This comedy about the idle rich threatens you with a good time, but ultimately doesn’t have anything to say"), do comedies always have to SAY something? The TimeOut reviewer complains that "Mullarkey doesn’t actually have anything cogent to say."

Has light entertainment, as in "Backstairs Billy," as well, fallen out of fashion?

I don't remember "One Man Two Guvnors" at the National saying much (old waiters stumbling up and down stairs with trays can be hilarious, maybe?), but it got the most 5 star reviews from the critics for any comedy in recent years.

I'd guess Mullarkey is being held to a different standard because his play is at the Royal Court, where saying something is more important than at the National lol.

Anyway, if Mullarkey had simply stuck to saying nothing, like "One Man Two Guvnors," and not tried to say something (ineffectively) in the second half, the production would have been funnier, and for me, that would have been better.

Why is it an odd location? Haven’t seen it, but if you’re mocking Sloane Ranger types then surely a theatre in Sloane Square is the perfect place to do it?

That mission statement is a bit of a rewriting of history though. It is only in relatively recent years they’ve exclusively focussed on agitprop new writing. Before that they had a much broader programme. For example when Ian Rickson was running it his biggest hit was an entirely conventional production of The Seagull starring Kristin Scott Thomas. There are many other examples.

Still tempted to see it & decide for myself, as the premise was interesting & though the negative reviews outweigh the positive by c 2:1, the favourable ones I've seen have been very keen. Must've sold quite well before PN as bookings look reasonable & I've seen no offers since.