The Hypocrite

The Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon

4/5

IN HIS programme notes to The Hypocrite, playwright Richard Bean explains that theatre has a right to bend history.

In this brilliant comic farce, blitzkrieg might be a more accurate word.

Earlier in the year, this combination of the RSC resources — a 19-strong cast and Hull Truck’s characteristic northern energy — opened Hull’s City of Culture 2017 celebrations.

While Stratford audiences might miss some of the local references, the calculated and often corny asides keep the laughometer busy.

From the opening of his treatment of Hull’s critical involvement in the English civil war, the audience is bombarded with a barrage of verbal and visual running gags which only the most humourless puritan could resist.

The hypocrite here is Governor Sir John Hotham (Mark Addy), who famously refused Charles I entry into the city that housed the country’s major arsenal, the prize for both royalist and parliamentary forces in the upcoming revolutionary wars.

As the seesaw fortunes of the two sides fluctuate, so Hotham’s loyalties shift. Warned that the king is due in Hull the next day, a frantically desperate Sir John exclaims: “Sodom and tomorrow!”

Bean throws every pantomime element into the pot.

We get Prince Rupert and the Duke of York disguised in drag as street fishmongers seeking to blow up the armoury and among the revolutionary movements abounding at the time, surely Bean’s — and our — favourites are not the earnest Ranters or Diggers but the Family of Love, a jolly crew.

They are obviously enjoying life with their irrefutable argument that as God created sin, they are only enthusiastically carrying out his work and they’re immune to Hotham’s protest: “If Jesus Christ had preached that kind of doctrine, they’d have crucified him.”

Phillip Breen’s production complements the text with multiple pratfall jokes, including the marvellous shambling servant Drudge, played by a sluggishly athletic Danielle Bird as a Baldrick-like figure, casually thrown into the cellar or hung on the coat hooks whenever in the way.

If Bean does not draw knowing parallels between his rumbustious presentation of a 17th-century “world turned upside down” and our own grotesquely chaotic times, the pain and anger of the dispossessed is nevertheless powerfully registered in folk-rock songs punctuating both the action and the shenanigans of their “betters.”

If politics was never as much fun as this, it should have been. Runs until April 29, box office: rsc.org.uk

Gordon Parsons