Catch this if you can

David Green

Caught in the Net, by Ray Cooney, Jill Freud & Company, Southwold Summer Theatre, St Edmunds Hall until August 15 and transferring to Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh, August 18 - 22.

Farce is, perhaps, the most difficult of all the performance arts, requiring fast pace, great timing and bags of energy. The director, Richard Frost, and the cast of this production had obviously put in the required work because the opening night went with a whiz, turning into a delicious, electrically charged comic extravaganza.

Ray Cooney's best known play, written in 1982, is Run For Your Wife, about an affable bigamist. Twenty years on, and taking advantage of the internet and mobile phone revolutions, Cooney revisited the scenario and produced a script which hardly gives the actors (or the audience) time to draw breath, packed to the gunnels as it is with subterfuge, mistaken identities, slapstick action and, of course, a stream of double entendres.

The characters are all brought beautifully to life, the talented Richard Emerson as the wily John Smith, a man desperately trying to keep the knowledge of his bigamy from his two wives, played superbly by Ann Wenn and Jemma Churchill.

Mr Smith has to rely on the co-operation and invention of his lodger and friend, Stanley Gardener, played with magnificent verve by Clive Flint, a master of pace and timing if ever there was one. Flint takes the character from reluctant accomplice to the edge of a nervous breakdown as the subterfuge gets increasingly intense and complicated.

There were excellent performances too from Ben Tillett, as the good natured but gullible Gavin, Rosanna Miles as the precocious Vicki, and Jeffrey Perry as Stanley's dad, a geriatric who has lost some of his sense of direction but not his eye for the opposite sex.

And there is plenty of sexual innuendo in this delightful comedy which scorches a trail of laughs from beginning to end. Not to be missed.

David Green