One Man, Two Guvnors / National Theatre Live review – sweetly innocent comedy
1963 Brighton seems like a foreign country, but 2011 London seems hardly less distant. In the opening scene of One Man, Two Guvnors, characters are discussing a wedding (would be cancelled now), kissing (illegal now), eating sausage rolls and drinking champagne (both long since raided from the supermarkets), and, most shockingly, performing to an audience who are a) allowed to leave their houses, and b) allowed to convene in gatherings of more than two. I would say we didn’t know how lucky we had it, but the audience’s laughter suggests they are well aware of how much fun they’re having.
And that’s because One Man, Two Guvnors – created and performed when Nicholas Hytner still ruled the roost at the National – is amazingly funny. It was filmed during the 2011 National Theatre season and is available to watch on YouTube until Thursday 9th April. It’s a bizarre synthesis of comedia dell’arte, the Carry On films, music hall comedy, and a type of Miranda-esque gentle bawdiness. The “trunk moving scene” early on in the play is fantastically reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy’s attempts at moving a piano. Corden invites two members of audience on stage to help him and proceeds to spend the next five minutes making suggestive jokes at their expense. Oh 2011 – your sweet, sweet innocence.
The whole play depends on audience participation. The fourth wall is not broken so much as supposed to never have existed; both audience and cast are whole-heartedly engaged in creating and enjoying a night of fun. Nearly everyone who saw the play originally in 2011 would proudly tell friends and family “on our night, when Corden asked for a sandwich, someone had actually brought one!”. It was only the age and gender of the sandwich-bearer and the flavour of sandwich that changed (apparently on one night there were even pork pies). Now, I have a theory about this – I do not believe that Hytner’s National would go so far as to pay a different actor each night to sit in the audience and sheepishly lift up a sandwich of their choice. Rather, I like to think that if you book a chosen seat – stalls, about three rows back – you are told to bring a sandwich and to admit to it when Corden asks. If you did see the play in its original run and were either asked to bring a sandwich or brought one of your own volition please do get in contact – I’m genuinely intrigued as to how this works (and to find out what type of person brings a sandwich to the theatre).
Audience involvement aside, poor Christine – a woman who is brought up on stage and looks terrified the whole time she’s there, is forced into compromising positions by Corden, has soup and other food splashed on her dress, and is finally assaulted with a fire extinguisher – has to be an actor. Even Corden could not take it that far, surely…
One Man has a wonderful riff on the perennial Shakespearean conceit of identical – but different gendered – twins. How else would Twelfth Night work? Rachel (disguised as Roscoe) expends great effort in explaining why she it is biologically impossible for her to be her brother’s identical twin, an explanation which nearly saves Corden when he is attempting to escape his two guvnors’ realisation that they were sharing the same man. The jokes hit all their targets, from posh boarding schools, to Margaret Thatcher and The Beatles, but the play succeeds in never feeling anything but fun; any malicious edge that might have crept in is kicked far out of this corner of Brighton by Corden’s ebullient presence.
The delight of this filmed performance of One Man, Two Guvnors is that the comedy still works even when you’re watching it in the same room you’ve spent most of fourteen days in and the pyjamas you put on last Monday. Being in the audience looks hilarious, but you do feel slightly safer at home.
The National Theatre are also streaming Jane Eyre, Twelfth Night, and Treasure Island in the coming weeks.