Caroline's Kitchen

In an age when so many plays are adapted from  books or films, and so many musicals are little more than back-catalogue jukeboxes, the Original Theatre Company is surely to be commended for commissioning original drama. Tobin Betts play has had a bumpy ride, with luke warm reviews for its initial incarnation as Monogamy, leading to a change of title, cast and text. Judging by the evidence of the performance at the Theatre Royal, Betts has ironed out some of the more fundamental problems that belaboured this comedy of errors - while it remains flawed it is a fundamentally solid piece of work and, perhaps more significantly, it was hugely refreshing to be told a story I didn’t already know.
Played out in real time, Caroline’s Kitchen opened on a rehearsal for the eponymous heroine’s cookery programme. Betts intention, I presume, was to contrast the idealised family home of her show, with the unravelling situation we go on to witness. It’s a clever idea, but not one he fully realises. The horrors of Caroline’s increasingly fraught entanglements were entertaining enough, yet beyond the kitchen knife left sitting on the worktop like Chekhov’s gun, her status as a cooking guru seemed incidental. What Betts looks to be far more interested in, and was far more successful at exploring, is the dynamics of a middle-aged, middle-class life. This is a play in which we spend ninety minutes in the company of people that talk and talk and yet never listen.
At the centre of this perfect storm, Caroline Langrishe was very effective in a lead role reminiscent of Wendy Craig in Butterflies. My only misgiving is that Butterflies was on the telly forty years ago –– if I had been told it this was a Carla Lane revival I wouldn’t have been surprised – and throughout, there was something curiously old-fashioned about the play. Her son’s shocking revelation is a case in point, in that wasn’t shocking at all, though here Brett was perhaps saying more about Leo’s petulant self-absorption that the substance of his reveal. Tom England was completely convincing as brattish, self-entitled Leo, and the scenes between mother and son were some of the strongest in the play.
And yet there was something plodding in the exposition of these early scenes that needed tightening up, with too many pregnant pauses and not nearly enough wit, the blame for which must be levelled as much at the director Alastair Whatley as at the playwright.  A key problem with this production was not so much the individual actors, who generally acquitted themselves well, as the contrasting acting styles, which Whitley indulgently let loose on stage. Langrishe and England’s naturalism contrasted uneasily with Jasmyn Banks’s crude caricature of a predatory PR assistant, that seemed   to have sashayed her way on stage from a Carry On film. While Banks may appear to have been the weak link in the chain, I strongly suspect that poor direction was just as much to blame. More successful was Aden Gillett’s grandstanding Donald Wolfit impression (for all its incongruence, it was when Gillett appears that the play truly sprung to life) with a heightened performance that won some of the best laughs of the night. The chemistry between Elizabeth Boag’s convincingly drunk Sally and Alan Gillett’s character lifted the production just when it needed it, particularly as the romance between Caroline and James Sutton’s underwritten Graeme had singularly failed to convince.
For all its shortcomings, there was much to enjoy here. While the setup may have been a tad laborious, all the various plot strands did start to pay off, including that aforementioned knife. As the play morphed into a straightforward farce, the cast started to look like they were having fun – and it was fun that was infectious. The portent of thunder and lightning signalled we were entering the territory of the morality tale, finally making sense of Caroline’s bolt on religiosity, as crisis turned into absurdity and all sorts of comedy business filled the stage with pleasing mayhem. It was the sheer zest and commitment of the actors that eventually wore down the hardest of hearts, defying the audience to not have a good time. Beaten into submission by their vigour, I found myself chuckling at a production that was ultimately very entertaining and, frankly, a bit of harmless fun. What remains frustrating about this show is not that it was bad, because it wasn’t bad, but that with a little more tinkering it could have been so much better.