Multi-tasking actors are a masterstroke

“TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT” Oldham Coliseum, by Paul Genty

GRAHAM GREENE isn’t the first writer you think of when comedy comes to mind.

It’s fairly safe to say his melancholy stories of lowlifes and unspeakable Johnny Foreigner rank him somewhere near the bottom on the comic masterpiece list.

The same is even true of his lightest work, “Travels With My Aunt”, the story of a dull former bank manager in the Sixties.

Look at this apparent comedy a little more than superficially and it is actually a rather sad story.

It tells of a woman who had a child with her philandering brother-in-law, abandoned the boy and instead lived a selfish life at full speed, returning only after he has opted for a dull retirement, following a career of equal greyness.

But in famed director and writer Giles Havergal’s hands the book becomes, almost miraculously, a story of foreign travel, exotic places and even more exotic characters, presented for little more than their entertainment value and with great humour.

Havergal boiled the story to its comic essence of travel and exoticism.

He played a master stroke by quirkily calling for only four actors to play dozens of characters, all of them playing the dullard at the show’s heart, sometimes all at the same time — even finishing each other’s sentences.

Joyce Branagh’s production breezes its way through London, Paris, Venice and Istanbul, ending up among former war criminals and smugglers in Paraguay.

The four performers — Kieran Buckeridge (the only one also to play Aunt Augusta), Chris Hannon, Tony Jayawardena and Robin Simpson — clearly have a ball all evening.

They jump in and out of various characters, from Black drug runner Wordsworth to ex-Nazi war criminal Mr Visconti, not forgetting CIA man Tooley and his daughter of the same name.

Each change is achieved by little more than a different wig or minor prop.

A large part of the evening’s success is also Sophie Kahn’s design, a storybook, hand-drawn black and white wall of doors and windows, each revealing colourful scenes of foreign parts.

Such downside that there is stems from the nature of the work: it’s a fairly relentless narrative, hardly ever stopping but failing to draw out much in the way of relationships and characters. It gets a little wearing in the second half — but the book does too, and a heck of lot sooner.