Review: THE FALSE SERVANT, Orange Tree Theatre

Love Island, or the marmite of reality television, started last week. If you watch every episode zealously or scoff at its emetic drudgery, you cannot deny it is part of the landscape of contemporary British culture. But the performance of gender dynamics and turning sexual tension into entertainment is nothing new.

Enter Pierre Marivaux's The False Servant. Redolent of 18th century gender centric comedies likes Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Cosi Fan Tutti, Marivaux's 1724 play was given a slick update by Martin Crimp in 2004. Crimp's language is like a missile strike: precise, accurate, and explosive. Coupled with his almost Pinteresque attention to power dynamics, his version of The False Servant is thoroughly modern and thoroughly relevant in an age where the ontology of gender is constantly questioned, probed, and explored.

Director Paul Miller defangs any of the lingering 18th century cynicism by setting the action in the 1920s. Pencil moustaches, three-piece suits, and bob haircuts abound, as does the flighty Bright Young Things' recklessness and frivolity. There are mixed identities, surreptitious dealings, and dastardly plans to swill victims out of money. It is nothing too unfamiliar, but the epicentre of the action in the form of Lizzy Watts as the Chevalier acts as the intriguing focal point of the production that ensures it is more Judith Butler than P.G Wodehouse.

Watts' performance is deliberately theatrical. She plays at being the masculine "Chevalier" to dupe Lelio, a loutish Lothario, played by a gorgeously two-faced Julian Moore-Cook, who uses her to wriggle out of a marriage contract with Phoebe Pryce's opulent Countess. Except everyone double crosses each other and all hell breaks loose.

Watts ingeniously pokes fun at the men around her through her physicality. She struts around the stage mirroring and mocking Lelio's macho Wall Street swagger. Yet when her identity is rumbled by the rapscallion Trivelin, her theatrical presence morphs into something more feminine. It is remarkably subtle, and Watts manages it with ease.

Trivelin is the reluctant servant to the Chevalier who inhales vanity and exhales chutzpah. Will Brown may ensure he is a lovable narcissist, but the character's arrogance and self-confidence is part and parcel of his manhood, something that Watts again ingeniously undermines. Silas Wyatt-Barke undercuts all of the virile parading with his bumbling Arlequin who unknowingly pulls the string that unravels the tangled plot threads. All is laid bare, the Chevalier and Lelio must deal with the emotional fallout.

The actors' performance of gender is magnified by the lack of the production's theatricality. The stage is small, intimate and in the round. Sound and lighting design are kept to a minimum, only accentuating a scene's emotional beats rather than dictate them. The performers get up close and personal with the audience who are along with the ride rather than passive observers.

The result is a production that is subversive without being bogged down in marshy discourse or polemics. Miller's production is light on its feet and very funny whilst maintaining a serious question about the nature of gender at its core.

Miller, who is soon stepping down as artistic director of the Orange Tree, is going out with a bang, taking full advantage of theatre as an artistic medium. Where else can an audience be directly confronted, here in close proximity, with an unmediated performance? But brilliantly, the performances in The False Servant play at being performances, drawing attention to their own artificiality, and in doing so, also our own. Do men not also play at being men just as Watts' Chevalier does? Miller's The False Servant artfully highlights the theatricality of the mundane, the performances present within everyday life as men or as women or as both or as neither. All the world's a stage after all.

The False Servant plays until 23 July

Photo Credit: The Other Richard

 

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