STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES
St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden
★★★★
“A sunny, high-spirited, and thoroughly absorbing evening”
What fun! Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves is just the ticket for an evening of charming escapism and energetic frolics.
Performed by Alfresco Actors in the garden of St Paul’s, the Actors’ Church, this production makes wonderful use of its surroundings. The stage furniture is so minimal as to be a blank canvas. The company’s four actors are left to conjure the pandemonium of Bertie Wooster’s world out of a churchyard and their own ingenuity. They project over the hum of Covent Garden without ever letting the outside world derail proceedings.
P.G. Wodehouse was one of the great comic writers of the twentieth century, and this is an adaptation of his 1963 novel of the same name. His stories revolve around the amiable but gormless Bertie Wooster who has a smoothly competent valet, Jeeves. The comedy runs on wordplay, misunderstanding, eccentric characters, and the gap between Bertie’s chaotic attempts to solve problems and Jeeves’ serene ability to sort them out. The play involves an imperilled engagement, a formidable prospective father-in-law and a friend in need of a favour. The country house setting is another ‘character’, with social rules meaning one wrong word can ruin a young blighter’s life prospects.
Oliver Stockley adapts and directs. He pulls the material cheerfully into the present. Modern touches in the songs, dances, accents and sly asides litter the text. The audience laps it all up, from a parody of Hamlet to some frankly deranged choreography. The performers’ delight in the frothy piece is infectious.
Everything from the light comedy repertoire is here: slapstick, cancan dancing, verbal fizz and impeccable timing. Jonathan Deakin’s songs are most awfully clever. ‘Song of the King’ is a stand-out. The cast doubles as the band, giving the evening the loose, convivial swing of a garden party that has got slightly out of hand.
Shaun Mendum’s Bertie is a joy. His facial expressions alone are worth the price of admission. His physicality, wringing a whole range of emotion from one rubbery face, sits somewhere between Mr Bean and Inspector Clouseau. His willingness to get down and dirty during the tirade in the play-within-a-play deserves particular kudos.
Scott Slocombe provides the perfect counterpoint. His Jeeves is calm, grounded and utterly unflappable, as well as entirely lovable. Slocombe turns in a fine comic contrast as Madeline’s father. Lowenna Morgelyn moves gleefully and with real agility between generation and sex in her given roles.
Not everything lands. The pacing is slow to start, gaining dynamism only around the one-third mark. With four actors covering a houseful of characters and the costumes and props so pared back, it is sometimes hard to work out which of several characters an actor is portraying. Chioma Uma solves the problem brilliantly. Her inventive accents and mannerisms differentiate her three roles of Emerald, Stinker and Plank without any need for a costume change.
What makes the evening so enchanting is the actors’ sheer enthusiasm. They embrace the silliness without apology and invite the audience to do the same. For two hours, you forget the sensible world beyond the railings and immerse yourself in glorious absurdity.
A sunny, high-spirited, and thoroughly absorbing evening of outdoor theatre. Come prepared for music, physical comedy, linguistic mischief and plenty of Wodehouse-inspired mayhem. Leave your good judgment at the church gates.
STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES
St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden
Reviewed on 18th August 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Cosmic Xposure
