We all know about plays within plays, those little episodes where actors playing actors perform a short drama that usually relates in some way to the main plot. 

John Chapman’s Kindly Leave the Stage takes the convention further. At first, the audience thinks it’s watching an Ayckbourn-style middle-class comedy. After a while, though, things start to curdle: lines are forgotten or repeated and we seem to be watching a group of actors quarrelling about the best way to present the play.

The real play is taking over from the play-within, and the actors’ own lives turn out to be every bit as dramatic as those of their characters. They remain on the ‘stage’ as adulterous and even murderous inclinations emerge and, worse, professional jealousies and grudges are aired without inhibition.

The play and the play-within become hopelessly intertwined, generating plenty of laughs but little hope of resolution. Meanwhile the button that controls the curtain has jammed and most of the fictional audience have gone off to the pub.

Graham Wilson dominates the stage as the arrogant, vindictive, Shakespeare-hating and thoroughly unlikeable Rupert. He’s ably supported by Phil Cole, Natalie Milne, Denise Casey, Yvonne Jessop, Kimberley Buchan and Glenda Marshall. Bill Borlase directs, and also takes on the role of Edward – sozzled, on his last legs, and not sure if he’s meant to be acting Lear or not.

Despite occasional sagging, the production is highly enjoyable. It features another of Andrew Cook’s excellent sets and a lovely blue velvet curtain that I look forward to seeing again.
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When you know the author is one of the team that brought us television’s Are You Being Served? you really should know what to expect. John Chapman is a long-established English playwright – why, in the 1960s my brother strutted his stuff in a school production of Chapman’s farce Dry Rot. 

Kindly Leave the Stage has a solidly crafted old and reliable premise: the play-within-a-play, or actors sending up themselves and their trade. For substance it is not to be compared with the last Globe production reviewed, the lingeringly memorable Dumb Waiter. 

The play opens in the middle of a dinner party which has been embarrassingly interrupted by a major row between the host and hostess. While the wife, Sarah, continues to offer food, the husband, Rupert, drags out a rather unlikely hamper to start packing. 

The guests, married couple Charles and Madge, are both solicitors who offer to handle the divorce for Sarah and Rupert respectively. Sarah’s mother, Mrs Cullen, arrives and signally fails to pour oil on troubled waters. (Now there’s a metaphor that really doesn’t work any more, thanks, BP!) 

Then for the twist: despite a couple of loud prompts from the wings, the actors apparently depart from the script as ‘Rupert’ can no longer restrain his fury over his discovery that his real-life wife, the actress playing Madge, is doing the wild thing in her dressing room with the actor playing Charles. (We never learn their true names.) 

As further complication, ‘Sarah’ reveals she has a crush on ‘Rupert’, who by now is brandishing a knife in his rival’s face. ‘Charles’ leaps into the hamper for protection, and the farce really begins, to be whipped to a potential frenzy by the arrival of Mrs Cullen’s husband Edward. He is actually an ageing alcoholic thespian who still dreams of his glory days playing Lear, and he is utterly confused by the turn the play has taken. 

The Globe has built a traditional box set complete with blue velvet stage curtains, perfect for this play, to separate audience from frantic actors. Designer Andrew Cook has created one of his gorgeous sets, a subtly tongue-in-cheek parody of the classic drawing-room comedy, with tasteful middle-class furnishings of oyster and pink.

But the set is not framing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. This script does not allow for real tension, and these middle-class couples never seem to be playing for high stakes – we know that brandished knife is never going to cut a throat. The direction needs to counter this by ensuring the audience does not have the time for its suspension of disbelief to flag, but in fact there are too many delays. The script also contains a great deal of repetition, those ghastly actor-nightmare moments when the dialogue disastrously loops back on itself, and this makes it crucial the pace should be lickety-split. It is not.

Apart from the lagging between cues, however, the actors tackle their dual roles confidently. Denise Casey (Sarah) pouts and smoulders darkly in a sexy red dress, with angelically fair Natalie Milne (Madge) as a sweet contrast. Phil Cole makes a nervous foil for Graham Wilson, who storms round the stage as the aggrieved husband. Most effective is the moment when ‘stage’ accents are suddenly dropped, so that Wilson becomes Cockney, Cole richly Welsh. 

Kimberly Buchan is appealing and funny as the star-struck prompt, desperately trying to keep the production on track, and Bill Borlase, in the role of the inebriated ham actor, relishes his chance to spout some genuine Shakespeare.  

Glenda Marshall makes a credibly cosy St John Ambulance nurse, though that brings me to a missed opportunity that bothered me – Mrs Cullen’s line, “Is there a doctor in the house?” should surely be delivered straight into the audience, where the First Aid nurse would naturally be on duty, and hence ready to make her comic entry onto the stage from there.
Still, there are a few good chuckles from classic farce moments, like the comments emerging suddenly from the hamper. Kindly Leave the Stage may be pedestrian compared with the brilliance of that other play about actors, the wonderfully ridiculous Stage Blood (Charles Ludlam), which the Globe presented in 2007, but under the heat pump, snuggled in Globe rugs, I found it a pleasant enough way to while away a winter evening. 
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