IT’S HER TURN NOW at The Mill at Sonning

★★★

“the play as a whole is genuinely very funny”

Meeting for a secret liaison in the Westminster Hotel, Tory junior minister Rebecca Willey gleefully urges special advisor to the opposition, John Worthington, to put on his “jim-jams” in preparation for the night of adultery ahead. The champagne and oysters are already on their way by the time Willey pulls back the curtains only to discover a limp body hanging across the windowsill. Attempting to move the body out of the hotel suite and evade discovery, any plans for the night are completely derailed as Willey (Elizabeth Elvin), Worthington (Raphael Bar), and Mrs. Willey’s PA, Georgia Pigden (Felicity Duncan) are tangled in an increasingly ludicrous web of lies.

‘It’s Her Turn Now’, adapted by Michael J. Barfoot and directed by David Warwick, is a gender-swapped take on Ray Cooney’s classic farce ‘Out of Order’. All of the action takes place in one room, a hotel suite set brilliantly designed by Alex Marker. A number of doors and, of course, the central sash window, allow the characters to revolve dizzyingly across the stage as Willey stands at the centre and struggles to maintain control as her life, and later her government, falls apart around her. This makes for some great moments of physical comedy, especially in Willey and Pigden’s manipulation of the corpse, and the play as a whole is genuinely very funny.

The central change replaces Cooney’s original male MP Richard Willey with the female MP Rebecca Willey, and the swap is quite effective, thanks in large part to Elvin and Duncan’s excellent performances as the conniving Mrs. Willey and the unfortunately implicated Georgia Pigden, respectively. The new dynamics that emerge refresh the play out of the overdone, and Barfoot’s writing plays on the swap humorously. That said, it nevertheless remains very safe, and somehow still manages to feel slightly old-fashioned: every swap, for example, is carefully carried through so that each romantic pairing remains a heterosexual one. The stakes are never really altered in any significant way.

“a refreshingly funny, well-acted and well-done take on the farce”

In a similar vein, despite a few moments of knowing wink-wink reference to the apparently perennially deceitful nature of politics, attempts at political bite are never really genuine: perhaps a missed opportunity, considering the not-so-distant memories of a certain health secretary. This is farce, however, and, while Big Ben looms through the window, the play never purports to be political. Our attention must instead be focused on the microcosm of disaster playing out in this one room.

Characters are rapidly accumulated as Willey, Pigden, and Worthington embroil themselves in deceit. However, as the play progresses, the pleasure of the double-triple-quadruple bluff does dwindle, and the fast and sinuous plotting of the first act is somewhat lost as the play becomes bloated and unwieldy with its own deceptions. I especially thought that the early interactions between Nurse Foster (carer of Pigden’s aging father, played by Jules Brown) and Georgia Pigden were a missed opportunity. Had the writing been marginally less focused on deception here, this could be a genuinely heartwarming moment. Instead, by the time the play tries to use it for denouement, the interaction has somewhat lost its power and become just another half-truth.

While the ending doesn’t seem quite tied-up enough to justify the increasingly convoluted plotting, and while the production remains, on the whole, quite offense-less, this was, overall, a refreshingly funny, well-acted and well-done take on the farce, that just about manages to pull off the gender-swap without taking advantage of it for cheap jokes.