Festive offering of gentle humour

ZACK, Royal Exchange, Manchester
THE Exchange steers clear of farce this Christmas and moves instead into gentle comedy. If someone had set this Harold Brighouse’s play to music, we’d have a full-blown Christmas love-story on our hands.

“Zack” — the Exchange likes it so much, this is its third outing since the Seventies — is Brighouse’s “Cinderella”.

The comedy doesn’t have the robustness of Brighouse’s work of genius, “Hobson’s Choice”; it needs careful handling to steer a course through feeling sorry for the central character and just thinking he’s a bit of a lazy slob.

Zack is the downtrodden member of the Munnings household. Tough mother (Polly Hemingway) and mean-spirited older brother Paul (Pearce Quigley) run the slightly failing joinery and catering business and push the 30-year-old youngest son around.

But all the bearded dummy needs is the chance to shine: his family doesn’t realise that while they think about money and status, Zack is the softly-spoken, bearded barrel who gets all the customers falling for his easy charm.

Things look up for him when lovely cousin Virginia comes to stay: mum sees her money and a potential match for Paul; she falls for sweet Zack instead.

But there’s a complication: Zack has stupidly joked about marriage to local girl Martha, and her father insists on him going through with it...

The production is notable as the drama debut of Manchester stand-up comedian Justin Moorhouse, and it’s a piece of casting, by director Greg Hersov, that almost pays off brilliantly.

We have seen Zack played mostly as a northern oik in the past, but Moorhouse gets him exactly right; a soft-centred, diffident, friendly man much put-upon by everyone around him, but not the idiot he is sometimes portrayed.

The downside of Moorhouse’s performance comes in his relative lack of drama experience: at points he seems almost on the verge of ad-libbing, and he lacks projection, being occasionally hard to hear (though he might claim this is the character).

And yes, he might be pushing it a bit to be the obvious object of affection of lovely cousin Virginia (Kelly Price), even if he is a charmer and she sees through his beard.

The play is amusing, warm and sentimental, with everything turning out right in the end. It’s not a patch on Hobson, but it turns out to be better than I remembered, with strong supporting performances.