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Show: The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary!
Society: London (professional shows)
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre. 16b Jermyn Street, St. James's, London SW1Y 6ST
Credits: Adapated from Gustave Flaubert by John Nicholson
Type: Sardines
Author: Susan Elkin
Performance Date: 06/12/2022
The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary!
Susan Elkin | 07 Dec 2022 10:37am
Jennifer Kirby AND Sam Alexander in The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! AT THE Jermyn Street Theatre. Photo: Steve Gregson
I don’t know what I was expecting when I opted to review a dramatisation of Flaubert’s famous 1856 novel but it certainly wasn’t this fresh, pacy, Brechtian, hilarious four-hander.
The novel was controversial from the outset. Flaubert faced an obscenity trial for promoting adultery and suicide. He was acquitted. Interestingly though, 166 years later these issues are still with us. I am writing this on the day on which Indonesia, chillingly, criminalised sex outside marriage.
We start on a convincing set depicting an old fashioned French kitchen. As the story spins away we get things drawn on chalk boards (a tap which turns in mime or a duck which lays an egg, for example), hands passing props though windows, realistic sound effects (bravo Matt Eaton), a table which becomes, among many other things a piano, a cow being milked and a seat at the opera. Sometimes characters step out of role and address the audience It’s surreal, unpredictable fun and fine physical theatre.
At the same time a serious story is being spikily told. Emma Bovary longs for something more interesting than a humdrum life as the wife of a country doctor. In the end she finds it – briefly. Jennifer Kirby finds plenty of complexity in a woman who can assist her husband at surgery, show very little interest in her own child, and ricochet from depression to passion. The scene in which she has sex in the woods with her lover (Dennis Herdman – lovely work) is one of the funniest sex scenes I’ve ever seen because it’s all in the minds of the audience as we watch them squeezing red balls and reacting to an extending tape measure which droops when they gleefully repeat the scene at the start of Act 2.
Of course there’s masses of multi-roling, Alistair Cope is master of different voices and dives in an out of doors to great comic effect. Sam Alexander is excellent as Charles Bovary trying to be reasonable but so often looking ridiculous as the cuckold.
The success of this joyously original play is undoubtedly down to Marieke Audsley’s imaginative direction – the use of the space (especially the things we can see through a thin back screen) is skilful. But of course the real star of the show is writer John Nicholson who has created something witty and entertaining from a novel which is probably not widely read these days – there was a joke made about this in the production when Denis Herdman asks the audience for a show of hands to find out who’s actually read it. Yes, for the record, I have, and more than once. But not for while. Time to revisit it, I think.