TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

‘She’s Miranda’s mother,’ hissed the young chap behind me. ‘You know, always saying “Such fun!”’ He was referring to Patricia Hodge, star of a new musical version of Graham Greene’s comic caper, Travels With My Aunt, whose appearance on telly as Miranda Hart’s upbeat ma has made her face familiar to a new generation, or, as she puts it, ‘a raft of young people who wouldn’t know [me] from a bar of soap’.

Which reminds me that in this light and larky show, the witty lyricist Anthony Drewe rhymes ‘familiar’ with ‘sillier’, the latest adjective earned by Hodge, so often typecast as posh, prim and proper. Her Aunt Augusta is properly posh. But there is little prim about this emancipated, briskly spontaneous 75-yearsyoung adventuress who scoops up her constrained, conventional, dahlia-growing nephew Henry (‘The only path that I shall tread is to the potting shed’) at what he supposes is his mother’s funeral and takes him on an eyeopening, taboo-busting, globetrotting tour.

She sweeps imperiously in, impatient to get the cremation over (‘The dead are late already. Let’s help them on their way,’) and introduces Henry to her companion Wordsworth (Hugh Maynard). ‘He attends to my needs,’ she says, giving him a suffocating snog. ‘He’s from Sierra Leone,’ she adds, as if that explains everything, echoing ‘He’s from Barcelona’, Basil and Sybil Fawlty’s excuse for anything Manuel did. Cue Jig Jig, a saucy number (George Stiles wrote the music), sassily performed by the chorus in 1960s miniskirts. It’s the ideal excuse for Wordsworth’s calypso homage to his older lover: She Puts The Living In Life.

The costumes alone – Aunt A’s silk suits, trolley-dolly outfits and paisley-printed frocks for hippy chicks – are worth singing about in Christopher Luscombe’s slickly minimalist production.

Steven Pacey, grey yet boyish, is rather good as the retired, retiring Henry, irresistibly caught up in Augusta’s drama, smoking pot on the Orient Express, falling a little bit in love with a hippy young enough to be his daughter, and even becoming a smuggler in Paraguay. When he boldly sheds his grey suit in favour of linen and a Panama, it’s like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

Only Augusta and Henry have much to say or do, most of which is skin-deep, reflecting Greene’s tendency to stereotype characters, and the piece has neither a show-stopper nor a take-home tune. And yet, it has that oldfashioned thing called a message – keep living your life, whatever your age – making it appropriately diverting. Worth leaving home for.

Until 4 June at the Chichester Festival Theatre, Chichester: 01243-781312, www.cft.org.uk