A witty piece of throwback theatre,
Games of Love and Chance mixes wordplay with slapstick, wit with silliness all to admirable effect, but most of all, it’s jolly good fun.
The performances are all pitch-perfect. Sir Oscar Botcherby (Hamish Colville) is a fantastically arrogant and silly presence who somehow manages to pull off being casually genial and casually cruel. Charlie Quinn (Ed Sheridan) is charming as the Hugh Laurie-like fop who, though he has something to hide, is determined to have fun. But it is Amy Millns as Edith Smith who often ends up stealing scenes. Her turn as a maid pretending to be a lady is nuanced and hilarious. From her slightly exaggerated physicality to her embarrassingly overdone laughter, her performance is wonderfully silly and sympathetic. Praise must also be given to Felix Trench as Martin Botcherby, who makes the best of a small role, seemingly getting a laugh with everything he does.
The script by David K. Barnes is both light and funny. The dialogue is sharp and the plot (usually much harder in these kind of farces) is for the most part tight. Towards the middle, the play loses some of its momentum because it adopts a darker, rather more serious tone that doesn’t appear to work as well. However, this is soon picked up with a very fast-paced and funny ending; all the plot strands come together with the slickness that one expects of the genre. But it is the subversive, revisionist approach of the play which really makes it shine, proving that period pieces can be shot through with an entirely 21st century mindset.
There is also a live three-piece jazz band, which do an effective job of creating an atmosphere. However, sometimes they do feel overused, as if they're scoring every joke. They fall just short of doing a ‘ba-dum tish’ after a punchline, but only just.
Games of Love and Chance mixes wordplay with slapstick, wit with silliness all to admirable effect, but most of all, it’s jolly good fun.
