Review: Arms & The Man at The Orange Tree Theatre by Christopher Walker
He’s done it again. Paul Miller has another hit on his hands, writes Christopher Walker.
The artistic genius who’s breathed life into the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, last night opened Arms & The Man.
It’s a highly successful production of George Bernard Shaw’s great comedy.
“I sing of Arms & The Man” is the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid.
Shaw took it as his title of this send up of heroes and heroism, with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
He was writing at a time when half the battleships in the world were British, and interventionism justified by Gladstone’s “Bulgarian Horrors, and the Question of the East” pamphlet.
The kind of idealised heroism shown by the two lovers at the centre of this comedy was a reality of daily life – with fatal consequences.
The kind of foolishness that would take the world to the brink in the Great War.
Paul Miller has chosen to dial the comedy up from subtle irony to full on Fawlty Towers.
Alex Bhat is hilarious as Sergius, the young fool who leads a cavalry charge into a battery of machine guns, and Rebecca Collingwood excellent as his day-dreaming girlfriend Raina.
Her loopy view of the world is majorly challenged when a young Swiss soldier shins up her drainpipe, and eats a box of chocolate creams.
Bluntschli, subtly played by Alex Waldmann, enlightens her as to what war is really like. And the reality that heroism is often accident or folly.
Raina’s parents are soon fighting their own rear-guard action. Miranda Foster is spot on as the upwardly mobile battle-ax, beautifully dressed by Simon Daw.
While Jonathan Tafler milks his lines as her bumptious husband.
Because this is Shaw, we of course have an undercurrent of social tension with a pair of wily servants.
Jonah Russell and Kemi Awaderou, who are so much more on top of what is really happening than their pompous masters.
All good clean fun, if a little extra poignant at this time of real horrors in the East.
Arms & the Man is on at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond
Pictured: Alex Waldmann in Arms and the Man Picture: Ellie Kurttz
