Comic tale fails to find focus — until it’s too late

You Can’t Take it With You, Royal Exchange, Manchester
Royal Exchange Christmas productions have a bit of a reputation for being patchy, but usually this happens year to year, not in the same show.

This zany comedy comes with the pedigree of Kaufman and Hart, who wrote for the Marx Brothers and won a Pulitzer Prize for this in 1937.

It’s a slightly subversive tale for its time, of a Bohemian family and a banking family getting together for the engagement of daughter and son respectively; making a mess of the encounter but trying again — only to help the banker realise a free life is best, since you can’t take your cash with you.

The Exchange works here with physical theatre specialists Told By An Idiot and its director Paul Hunter, who is in charge of this show and hits us with everything he has in the first act.

Wild scene changing and set dressing, overplayed characters, lots of running about and mad situations — not to mention a sort of cartoon directing style — thus come across as a lack of focus.

Comedy is at its best when the characters don’t realise they are in one; here we don’t, early on, get any sense of real people.

It is well into the play before the zaniness of firework-makers, would-be ballet dancer and her Russian home-tutor; would-be playwright or possibly painter, and so on — actually start telling some sort of story, by which time my sense of humour was wearing thin.

But after the interval the evening changes direction — and becomes the comedy Kaufman and Hart presumably wrote.

The zaniness, now delineated, is toned down; the actors actually start acting, rather than fooling around and remarkably, in the last 20 minutes, characters and situations become very funny indeed. A bit late, you might think.

So this is a very uneven entertainment. The performances, such as they are, are high-energy but only after a while amusing.

Christopher Benjamin is very watchable as the subversive grandfather; likewise Joanne Howarth as Penny, the playwright-painter. Sarah Ridgeway is likeable as the engaged daughter, as is Hugh Skinner as her intended. But the rest veer between sporadically funny and downright annoying until the play is reaching its end.