Charm Offensive presentsYou Can't Take It with You
by Moss Hart & George S Kaufman
October 24th 2007 - November 17th 2007
Show starts: 19:30 (15:00 Sat mats)
Running time: 2 hours
Meet the Sycamores. An eccentric, free-spirited family who happily play host to everyone, from tipsy Broadway showgirls to displaced members of the Russian aristocracy.
But when their daughter Alice introduces her fiancé’s uptight parents, fireworks erupt and the Sycamore's free wheeling life is put at risk. It is not long before we realise that if they are mad, the rest of the world is madder.
Following their acclaimed productions of The Gigli Concert and Gates of Gold dynamic young company, Charm Offensive, present Hart & Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic.
"This is better than many a west-end production and McAlinden should go far."
Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday on 'The Gigli Concert'
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Creative Team
Gavin McAlinden |
- Director |
Vicki Fifield |
- Designer |
Paul Colwell |
- Lighting Designer |
Matt Downing |
- Sound Designer |
Cast
Groucho the Kitten |
- Solo |
Jim |
- Michael Redston |
Mac |
- Graham Bohea |
G Man |
- Chris McCalphy |
Essie Carmichael |
- Sarah Wildor |
Penny Sycamore |
- Sadie Shimmin |
Paul Sycamore |
- Ian Porter |
Mrs Kirby |
- Carolyn Lyster |
Mr Henderson |
- Patrick Lee |
Boris Kolenkhov |
- Rad Lazar |
Ed Carmichael |
- Mark Hesketh |
Martin Vanderhoff |
- Gawn Grainger |
Rheba |
- Gracy Goldman |
Mr Kirby |
- Peter Gale |
Gay Wellington/Olga Katrina |
- Caroline Fenton |
Mr De Pinner |
- Neil Boorman |
Alice Sycamore |
- Maria Bonner |
Donald |
- Anthony Mark Barrow |
Tony Kirby |
- Matt Barber |
Reviews
No, you can't. And you probably won't want to, because Gavin McAlinden's limp revival fails to make any case for this Moss Hart and George S Kaufman screwball comedy, which delighted an American nation still bruised and battered by the Depression back in 1936.
It is like a US Hay Fever but without Coward's barbed wit. In place of the Bliss family, Hart and Kaufman offer up the Sycamores, a tribe of studied eccentricity who are poor but oh so happy. These are the kind of people who keep a snake in the living room, serve sweets out of a skull and have White Russian grand duchesses popping round to cook the supper.
Without any visible means of support, the Sycamores indulge their artistic inclinations. Mother Penny has been writing plays for eight years after a typewriter was mistakenly delivered to the house, daughter Essie's absence of talent does not hold her back in her ambitions to be a ballerina, father Paul spends most of his time making fireworks and Grandpa Martin sits in the armchair offering homespun wisdom and avoiding income tax. But when second daughter Alice falls in love with Wall Street scion Tony, and the lad and his parents are invited to dinner, two different Americas come face to face.
Alice and Tony's engagement may hang in the balance, but do I care? Not a jot. Essentially this is a post-Depression America reminding itself loudly, and not entirely convincingly, that it is better to be jolly than rich, and that happiness is the best possible cure for indigestion. In a sharper production there might be some life left in this old crock, because amid the helpings of syrup there are some great one-liners. But McAlinden's production lacks astringency and assumes we will just fall for the play's period charms, racial stereotypes, inverse snobbery and all. Just in case you don't, there is a kitten to coo over.
Some may find the Sycamores frightfully amusing, but I am afraid there is not a performance here that persuaded me that these people are indeed the lovable oddballs that Hart and Kaufman surely intended. The company presenting this show is called Charm Offensive, but on stage the charm is so lacking that I longed to leap up and wring all of the Sycamores' smug little necks.
Lyn Gardner - The Guardian (2 stars) Read Full Review
It’s not avant-garde. That’s the first thing to say about Moss Hart and George S Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning perennial which opened in New York in 1936 and has remained popular with US audiences ever since. There are a couple of Russian characters, but neither is a Marxist and both find themselves in America as a result of having fled the Soviet revolution. The play is mildly anti-capitalist in sentiment insofar as its main message is that happiness is more important than money, but the principal characters, the eccentric Sycamore family, are only able to live as they do because they have a private income – it would be unwise, then, to overestimate the radicalism of its central thesis.
Set at the end of the Great Depression, it’s essentially a sitcom in format: the action takes place in the Sycamores’ living room as their ‘normal’ daughter Alice tries to persuade her beau that they can’t get married because he – and, more importantly, his conservative parents – would soon tire of her tribe’s madcap ways. (Pop makes fireworks in the basement, Mom is ‘artistic’, Grandpa keeps snakes, the family candies are served in a skull, etc.) You may not be able to take it with you, as the title says, but you sure can guess how it’s going to end.
Sentimentality notwithstanding, it’s very funny. The dialogue is surprisingly fresh (the sauciness of the sex references hasn’t dated at all) and Moss and Kaufman are masters of cranking up the madness. Gavin McAlinden’s production has some fine performances: Gawn Grainger achieves the perfect blend of common sense, sincerity and lunacy as the Sycamore paterfamilias.
Robert Shore - Time Out (4 Stars, Critics' Choice) Read Full Review
Another kind of alternative American dream is put forward in You Can't Take It with You. Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's 1937 domestic comedy is rather like an American Hay Fever or a lightweight screwball variation on G B Shaw's Heartbreak House. The Sycamores are a whimsically eccentric bunch. Mr S is down in the cellar making fireworks. His wife, a battily eager playwright, is auditioning a drunk actress. Meanwhile, the couple's ballet-mad daughter Essie is pirouetting around, laying the table and receiving a lesson from her erratic, histrionic Russian-refugee dance master, Boris Kolenkhov. Then in a farcical confusion of dates, the wealthy fiancé of the Sycamores' other daughter, Alice, turns up for dinner in the midst of this chaos with his stiff, bug-eyed parents in tow.
The snag is that some members of director Gavin McAlinden's large fringe ensemble can't act to save their lives. Alice Sycamore looks as if she's wooden to the core. Southwark Playhouse also needs to rake its view-blocking untiered seats if punters aren't to feel like flies on the wrong side of the wall.
Still, this new auditorium, under the arches by London Bridge, is a fine spacious venue with real promise. The dialogue is quirkily hilarious and Gawn Grainger proves delightful as Alice's mellow grandfather who resists the taxman and, thought-provokingly, advocates dropping out of the rat race because life is too short.
Kate Bassett - Independent on Sunday Read Full Review
Hart and Kaufman’s Pulitzer-prize winning celebration of love and unconventionality over money and narrow conformity is an American classic.
But in Britain, where it hasn’t received a major airing since Michael Bogdanov directed a National Theatre production in 1983, a revival is overdue.
Its thirties backdrop of recession and Wall Street’s limitations is acutely relevant to our sub-prime times and, at the micro-level, the portrayal of the excruciatingly embarrassing Sycamore family is perennially true.
The only potential barriers to bringing it across the Atlantic are the play’s strong moral undercurrent and tidy, happy ending.
But director Gavin McAlinden’s lightness of touch makes us feel its lack of cynicism is merely the light relief we have earned and the humour is cumulatively effective.
A sprawling cast ranges from Maria Bonner as the elegant Alice, who has difficulty seeing the funny side, to her pirouetting sister Essie, played by a convincingly clumsy Sarah Wildor - in life a former principal ballerina with The Royal Ballet - to Solo as Groucho, the extremely dainty kitten.
Presiding calmly over all is Gawn Grainger as Martin Vanderhoff, grandfather and custodian of the Sycamore family values.
The array of characters performs against Vicki Fifield’s maximalist set that takes full advantage of Southwark Playhouse’s expansive new venue.
Barbara Lewis - The Stage Read Full Review
What a madcap bunch the Sycamores are! Income-tax-dodging grandad’s philosophy is “do what you like, as long as you enjoy yourself”. Mother is a dramatist manqué, idly trying to decide whether to write a religious play, a war play or a sex play; father spends his days diddling with fireworks.
Daughter Essie is a keen but appalling aspirant ballerina, which just leaves her sister Alice, who is, with her secretarial job on Wall Street, the only one with an obvious means of financial support. Alice thinks her relations are “gay and fun, with a touch of nobility”; but their jolly eccentricity becomes problematic when she wants to marry Tony Kirby, her wealthy boss’s son.
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s tooth-rottingly sugary comedy won the Pulitzer prize in 1937, when it must have seemed a welcome sweetener amid the bitterness of the Depression. Today, its relentlessly sunny-side-up view, which maintains that money doesn’t matter as long as you have love, seems hopelessly naive and simplistic. And the Sycamores – whose collision with the conventional Kirbys recalls Coward’s Hay Fever – are an insufferably twee bunch.
This would all matter less if Gavin McAlinden’s production wasn’t so soggy. It’s seriously lacking in the necessary effervescent insouciance, and the actors are stiffly arranged on the Southwark’s wide stage. Sarah Wildor, a former Royal Ballet principal, comes closest to enlivening the piece as the irrepressible Essie, bouncing about wearing an expression of mildly unhinged delight. But Gawn Grainger as the elderly patriarch whose hedonism is the play’s keynote is a stolid presence, parked in his armchair and dispensing cod wisdom from beneath a furrowed brow.
There’s also a whiff of patronising racism here. Ditzy mama describes the Sycamores’ black maid and her boyfriend as “awfully cute, like Porgy and Bess”. Essie’s Russian ballet teacher is a clichéd bundle of dark passions and pessimism, and a Russian countess, who for no good reason pops round to cook the family blinis, is as unamusingly absurd as the drunken actress who makes an equally brief appearance. They are merely would-be wacky window-dressing in a play that seems a dated irrelevance.
Sam Marlowe - The Times Read Full Review