Lack of warmth hurts show

SUE Holderness and Jeff Harmer are philandering MP and wife in Out of Order. Picture: Darren Bell.

OUT OF ORDER

(Opera House, Manchester, to Saturday)

RAY Cooney celebrates his 85th birthday and 70 years in showbiz this year, and to mark it he is working on a season of mildly-updated versions of his best farces, directed by himself.

This should be a cause for rejoicing, since Cooney is undoubtedly the greatest of British farceurs and this has always been one of his best. But not so much this time.

The impeccable cast includes Shaun Williamson, Sue Holderness; Jeffrey Harmer (of Out of Order and other Cooney works on stage); Susie Amy of Footballers' Wives; James Holmes; Arthur Bostrom and even David Warwick as a dead body, and should be a cause for ripe anticipation of a crackling night of laughs.

The story is complicated enough: junior minister Richard Willey (Harmer), wants to spend the evening with Jane, one of the Opposition's secretaries (Susie Amy, very fetching in her undies), in the Westminster Hotel.

Things don't go as he planned, starting with the discovery of a body trapped in his suite's unreliable sash window.

Dragging his private secretary George Pigden (Williamson), into the mess, Willey's situation goes from bad to worse, and with the arrival of Jane's distraught young husband (Jules Brown) and his own wife (Holderness), the money-grabbing antics of the room service waiter (Holmes) and intervention of a nurse, the intrusive hotel manager (Bostrom) and others, Dick Willey's night goes downhill fast.

Perhaps it was because this was the first night of an eight week tour and is still working itself in with an audience, but the evening wasn't as sublimely silly as it might have been. Frantic, especially in the second half, certainly, but Williamson seemed at times to be mugging for the sake of it, and the money-loving waiter (Holmes) a little too obviously shark-like in his appreciation of cash.

None of the characters are portrayed with any warmth, so when they get into very deep theatrical water, it's hard to care about them.