Boeing Boeing

Oh what joy!  The revival of Boeing Boeing at the Comedy theatre is every bit as good as the critics (with the exception of a humourless man from the Sunday Express) said it was.  It's almost half a century old and the director Matthew Warchus has tweaked the text a little, while keeping the 1960s Parisian setting and the period.  Thanks to Terri Paddock and her Whatsonstage.com team, we had the chance to chat to the cast afterwards, and they made the point that the play can't be updated to 2007 because it belongs in the era when air hostesses were real figures of glamour.  Marc Camoletti's play is one of the most successful ever written, having run for years and years in Paris, London and almost everywhere else.  Like Feydeau, the master of the genre, Camoletti takes time to build up his characters before unleashing the whirlwind on them.  That's what pushes this play up from business class into first class.  The timing is impeccable and the acting is just perfect.  Roger Allam told us he had acted in lots of comedies but this was his first outing in a farce -- an interesting insight from such an experienced actor.  Mark Rylance steals the show as the dowdy provincial Robert, who comes to stay with Parisian lawyer Bernard, his old schoolfriend, just at the moment when his complicated love life starts to unravel.  The uncertainties of international air travel means that Bernard's three air hostesses all turn up in Paris simultaneously.  Rylance plays Robert as a tweedy, awkward country mouse with a Welsh accent, who creeps apologetically on to the stage but starts to revel in his role protecting Bernard's secrets. This is the funniest performance that anyone in London is likely to see for years.  I can remember seeing the legendary Alastair Sim in Pinero's The Magistrate at Chichester in the 1960s, the elderly Eric Sykes wielding his zimmer frame in Ray Cooney's Caught In the Net, and Patricia Hodge juggling the sardines in Michael Frayn's Noises Off.  Well, Rylance tops all of them.  The sight of him waving his arms frantically with a plastic airline bag hanging from each elbow as Tamzin Outhwaite gives him an American technical kissing lesson is just too good to be true.  Brilliant.