“Charley’s aunt can’t come,” wails Jack. This is catastrophic because Jack’s and Charley’s day, their romantic interests and the rest of their lives depend on the arrival of this mysterious old lady from Brazil. The young women concerned are eager enough to meet them but, this being the 1890s, a chaperone is needed. Just coincidentally, however, their friend, Lord Fancourt Babberley, has plans for the day that include dressing up in women’s clothes. This makes him a magnet for all kinds of unexpected attention, some of it amorous. 

In the manner of all the best farces, very little goes according to plan, identities become confused, misunderstandings multiply and contrivances grow increasingly desperate.

A theatrical staple for over a century, Brandon Thomas’ melodrama is more than a little creaky, but that just adds to its charm.

Brian Beresford’s experienced direction ensures a cracking pace and spot-on timing. He has assembled a highly capable cast whose lively performances work together well, although occasionally some diction is a little unclear. Top marks go to Dylan Shield, making a welcome return to the Globe after an absence of several years, as reluctant cross-dresser Lord Fancourt, and Globe newcomer Claire Freel, also the show’s assistant director, glamorous and confident as Charley’s real aunt.

Visually, the production is a treat. Stylish sets are designed by Beresford and the Act 3 set, in particular, takes us back to the world of chaises-longues and late-Victorian luxury. Excellent costumes by Rachael McCann feature beautiful gowns, striped blazers and boater hats.

Like The Mystery of Irma Vep, just finishing at the Fortune, Charley’s Aunt is a sure-fire comedy with wide appeal, and just the thing for end-of-year celebrations. Thursday night’s audience had a great time. 

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Why on earth are we eternally amused by a man in a dress? Charley’s Aunt, with plot and humour based on little else,has been an amazingly successful play from its inception in 1892 through its London run of nearly one and a half thousand performances, to recent sell-out revivals on Broadway.

I wonder how many times it has delighted patrons and box offices in New Zealand? I have a happy memory of Fortune co-founder Murray Hutchinson as the eponymous aunt back in the seventies.* It should be just the right cheerful nonsense to help us forget a fairly farcical year.

Two very youthful and charming if idiotic Oxford students, Jack and Charley, archetypal late Victorian upper class twits, are anxious to secure a chaperone for a luncheon party, at which they intend to propose to their lady-loves, Kitty and Amy. Fortunately they are about to be visited by a potential chaperone, Charley’s previously unmet benefactress, his aunt from Brazil (yes, yes, “where the nuts come from” – is there a better-known line in English Theatre?!). Unfortunately the wealthy aunt, Donna Lucia, telegraphs to say she is delayed.

Fortunately, the boys’ friend, Lord Fancourt Babberley, naturally nicknamed Babbs, is to act a woman in an amateur play, and has popped in to show them his costume. Unfortunately, once he has been persuaded to masquerade preposterously as the aunt, s/he finds that both Mr Spettigue, the girls’ crusty guardian and Sir Francis Chesney, Jack’s widowed military father, are anxious to court ‘her’ for ‘her’ supposed millions.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, the very charming true Aunt Donna Lucia arrives after all, bringing with her an adopted niece who coincidentally happens to be the girl poor Babbs desperately fancies, and the scene is set for what is known as the classic English farce. 

For classical English farce the Globe could hardly find a more experienced director than Brian Beresford: over the past 20 years he has acquired 44 credits in Globe productions alone, excelling in comedy, and earlier this year he directed a very creditable The Importance of Being Earnest (which was interestingly written three years after Charley’s Aunt).  Playwright Thomas is no Wilde, however, and his director cannot trust to brilliant dialogue to dazzle the audience. Here is where it is necessary to rely on the bloke in the dress, and exploit the comical incongruity of Babbs evading his suitors by hitching up his skirts to galumph clumsily across the stage. 

Beresford has ensured plentiful dollops of vigorous physical comedy from the moment the play opens with Jack upside down on the floor, his long legs up on the table, while he tries ineptly to compose a letter to his sweetheart. Some of the dialogue is rather repetitive, a drawback the cast deals with by keeping up a spanking pace, occasionally indeed reacting a shade before the cue, but giving their all with an engaging enthusiasm and assumed naivety.

It is such a pleasure to see Dylan Shield back on the Globe stage after too long an absence, well cast in the cross-dressing role and marvellously awkward as the false aunt. His expressive face is perfect for the hapless Babbs – no crass mugging is required to bring out every nuance of his character’s horror at his embarrassing predicament, followed by a dawning appreciation of certain advantages, accepting kisses from the girls with a hilarious complacency that infuriates his friends. Shield gives Babbs a heart though, and we sympathise when he must keep up the pretence in front of his beloved.

Thomas Makinson as Jack and Reuben Hilder as Charley, his two friends, make deliciously silly young men about town, and establish a light-hearted, plausible relationship which involves insulting each other frequently in the manner of Wilde’s Jack and Algy. Their asides to the audience are delivered with style and they even manage to carry off convincingly antiquated expressions like: “Don’t play the giddy goat!”  

The three lads’ ‘Bertie Wooster’ idiocy is neatly complemented by Brassett, their particular ‘Jeeves’. Miguel Nitis is painstakingly correct and long-suffering as the gentleman’s gentleman who is more knowledgeable and more solvent than they. The circuitous route of the half-crown tip that has to be borrowed from Brassett before it can be bestowed on him is a typically well-executed piece of absurdity.

The girls are sweetly captivating: Sofie Welvaert’s determined Kitty more sophisticated than Maisie Thursfield’s wide-eyed Amy; both making eyes at the boys shamelessly even while insisting on the proprieties. The four young lovers are nicely matched, and they all give attractively mannered performances, though some of the diction could be just a little crisper.

As Donna Lucia, the true aunt, Claire Freel is gracious and very feminine, observing the boys’ shenanigans with wry amusement, awaiting her moment to take confident control of the crazy situation.  Her adopted niece Ela, love-interest of Babbs, is acted by Gretel Moore, who, tossing her ringlets coquettishly, wisely ignores the author’s bossy stage direction not to play Ela sentimentally, and instead makes her quite ridiculously romantic – much more humorous to a contemporary audience. 

If there can be said to be a theme, it must be avarice, the feckless upper class’s need for money and the deplorable stratagems employed to acquire it. The older men are the ones who make the biggest fools of themselves, chasing ‘Charley’s Aunt’, and the actors accept this good-humouredly: Jim George (Sir Francis) barks his lines in the bluff manner we associate with retired army officers, and the ludicrous attempts of Andrew Wicken (Spettigue) at being amorous are actually very funny. 

The set (Brian Beresford) rather surprisingly changes from black curtains with a few selected furnishings for Jack’s rooms and the garden, to a fairly elaborate set (a piano! two chaises longues!) for Spettigue’s drawing room in the final act, but really the costumes (Rachael McCann) are all that is needed to establish the period. The girls are sweet in their demurely sashed frocks and Donna Lucia is elegance personified, with a hat that lends a dash of Brazil to London fashion and is the perfect answer to the pretend aunt’s outmoded bonnet.

The gentlemen’s top hats and waistcoats, the boys’ boaters and striped blazers, complete our picture of Victorian toffs, though I am amused to note that the Globe’s carefully preserved jackets are a little short in the sleeve for modern young men!  But we don’t seem to have outgrown Charley’s Aunt: established as a classic period piece, its gender politics can hardly be judged by modern standards, and the modern youth who fill the back row of the theatre are laughing riotously. It is a mad romp, on no account to be taken seriously, and as perfectly suited to the season as apricot bliss balls. Indulge. 
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*[Downstage produced it in 1985.]  
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This has been a busy week in Dunedin, with the 7^th Dunedin Theatre Awards presented by the Reviewers’ Collective at the Fortune on Monday night, presided over by our Living Taonga Louise Petherbridge and compered by the delightfully debonair Barry Dorking. The professional Fortune Theatre was prominent, of course, most notably with Grounded (directed by the theatre’s new Artistic Director Jonathan Hendry) named Outstanding Production of 2016. The Globe was also celebrated, especially for its ambitious Mary Stuart (Director Keith Scott), and there was recognition for brave young theatre companies, like Counterpoint, Improsauros, Discharge, Feral Grace and Little Scorpion Productions, many of which have emerged from the excellent University Theatre Studies programme.

Nicholas McBride was honoured for his achievement in reviving our biennial Arts Festival. And the award for Outstanding Contribution to New Zealand Theatre went to none other than Theatreview’s founder and editor, John Smythe. His is a remarkable achievement, having – along with Associate Editor (Dance) Raewyn Whyte – edited and published, and linked to, a total of nearly ten thousand reviews over eleven years.

So many theatre practitioners must have benefited immeasurably from the support, praise, and constructive criticism during that time. The loss of Theatreview would mean the demise of The Dunedin Reviewers’ Collective, and consequently of the Dunedin Theatre Awards. 

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