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Comic class act explores the manner born
REVIEW: LUCKY SEVEN
Hampstead Theatre
ONCE every seven years Alan, Tom, and Catherine break class lines and meet for a televised social experiment. Working class, middle class, and upper class perched on the sofa, waiting for the cameras to start rolling.
Told through a broken chronology that flits back and forth between the years, Alexis Zegerman’s first stage play explores the shifting off-screen relationships of the three and asks, with a keen wit, if we can ever really escape the manner born.
Zegerman is best known as a “Mike Leigh actor”, starring in last year’s Happy Go Lucky and his acclaimed 2005 play Two Thousand Years. She’s on familiar turf with this understated slice of socially conscious verité, but this is very much her own work: a paean to Seven Up!, a TV show of her youth, with a youthful streak of media-savvy, quietly absurd humour.
Comedies are rarely funny enough to deserve their product description, so it’s a great relief that Lucky Seven has jokes in abundance. The laughs are mostly drawn from the same well, that great tenet of British comedy – class.
Alan (David Kennedy) is a wideboy knicker manufacturer who perennially cajoles and tussles with Jonny Weir’s bookish, put-upon Tom, an archivist with chronic middle-class malaise. Susannah Harker is a stand-out as the skittish blue-blood Catherine, the object of both their affections; a mass of restrained contradictions, Princess Di ideation and errant facial muscles.
When the camera trains in on her in a video segment from the programme, you can see just how much work that face is doing.
Her eyebrows alone could act Keira Knightley out of the park.
Humour usually takes a human sacrifice and the male characters do feel a little flat, a mite one-dimensional, beside the towering
Catherine.
In the end, however, it matters little. Zegerman has created a light but beautifully turned study of human nature and all the repetitions, intellectual thievery, tragedy and hypocrisies inherent within it.
Until November 22
020 7722 9301 |
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