THE MAGISTRATE

A few weeks before the National Theatre’s Christmas show, a new adaptation of The Count Of Monte Cristo by Richard Bean, it was announced that the piece wasn’t quite cooked and we’d have to make do with Pinero’s Victorian farce, The Magistrate. Not quite as bad as the butcher informing you on Christmas Eve that the turkey had flown the coop, and handing over a frozen chicken, but disappointing all the same.

And so, alas, is Timothy Sheader’s production. If a farce doesn’t leave me with cheeks stained with mascara-black tears, it isn’t funny enough. Still, the premise of The Magistrate is a promising one: Agatha (a delicious Nancy Carroll) lopped five years off her 36 when she was widowed and found herself on the marriage market. Consequently her son, Cis, believes himself to be 14. The boy looks so enchanting in his little Lord Fauntleroy velvet suit that Lady Jenkins is forever popping him on to her lap. The maid is besotted. And poor Cis is confused. He has a taste for port and gambling and can’t keep his hands off his pretty piano teacher. Indeed, he confesses to be in a permanent ‘swell of agitation’.

Agatha knows it’s been a mistake. Her new husband Posket, the meek and mild magistrate of the title (a wonderfully prim-and- proper John Lithgow), wouldn’t have adored her any the less had she been 86 – but when Cis’s godfather returns from Bengal, she tells him to keep schtum. Things don’t go to plan… Not only does Posket find himself passing sentence on his wife but he, too, may have to come before the law.

Designer Katrina Lindsay wraps the production like a Christmas present, ribbons and all, and it opens like a pop-up book. The  downside of this is that it makes the production rather two-dimensional with the characters little more than cardboard cutouts that rob the situation of reality and, not to overdo it, real fear. If nothing is genuinely at stake, a farce loses its emotional force and becomes merely mechanical. Moreover, the introduction of would-be satirical Gilbert and Sullivanesque songs, sung by dandies, are neither sharp nor slick enough.

There is, nevertheless, much to savour in the sheer silliness of it all, specially Joshua McGuire’s irrepressible Cis, who has a quiff like a Mr Whippy icecream scoop. The show’s not a turkey, but nor is it the cracker it might have been.

Until 10 February 2013 at the Olivier Theatre, South Bank, London SE1: 020-7452 3000, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
It will also be broadcast to cinemas across the UK on 17 January.