Mates in Chelsea

By Gosh!

Mates in Chelsea

by Rory Mullarkey

The Royal Court Theatre, Chelsea until 16^th December

Review by Polly Davies

Rory Mullarkey’s Mates in Chelsea is a joy.   The script is clever, witty, and very funny and the cast romp through it, keeping the audience engaged throughout.  In the process it quietly takes a hammer to both the established social order and the socialist dream.  But this nihilistic message is best considered quietly at home later.  The play is far too fast paced and entertaining to miss a moment.

Laurie Kynaston’s s foppish Theodore (Tug) Bungay’s life as an entitled carefree bachelor is about to come to an end.  His modern- day Jeeves, Mrs Hanratty, convincingly played by Amy Booth-Steel is a card-carrying ex-member of the Baader Meinhof with a penchant for baking, and an inexplicable affection for him.  His socialite fiancée Finty Crossbell is becoming weary of an overlong engagement, and his ancestral home is about to be sold to a Russian Oligarch.  As the play develops, the audience are variously giggling at the topical references and innuendos, belly laughing at the delightful farce scene in the middle of the play, gasping at the incredible stage effects, or quietly watching and listening intently as the denouement unfolds. 

George Fouracres gives a stellar performance as Charlton (Charlie) Thrup, Tug’s best friend.  A politician with a background in foreign policy and an adventurous lifestyle, think Rory Stewart, he has been a friend and would be more, of Tug since schooldays.  His soliloquy as the oligarch Oleg Mikhailovich Govorov, with support of the ghost of Lenin, had the audience spellbound, quickly breaking the mood with a perfectly timed off-hand remark at the end.  (Why waste a good backstory?)

Charlie is visiting Tug at home in his Chelsea pad at the start of the play.  A quick visit between quelling the hordes in Afghanistan and a trip in a Kazakh space rocket, he is persuaded to abandon his plans and spend the summer in Tug’s idyllic Castle, on the Northumbrian coast.  This does little to comfort Flinty, his long-suffering fiancée, played with resignation by Natalie Drew. 

Move to the actual castle where Tug and the crew are joined by his mother, Fenella Woolgar as the appropriately named Agrippina.   Penny Dyer, their dialect coach, must have had some fun with the comic dialects in this cross between a farce and a sitcom.  With some beautifully funny impersonations, Laurie Kynaston and Natalie Drew come into their own here as alternative versions of Oleg Mikhailovich Govorov … before an assassin appears.

With truly dramatic stage effects, Tug’s castle is destroyed, and a helicopter rescue takes place, his ordered family life collapses and his friend and fiancée desert him.  Yet it seems likely he will survive, because like Charlie however lost he seems, we know he is really going to know who to call when the odds are against him.

I haven’t seen the earlier plays of Rory Mullarkey, but I much enjoyed this interplay between a modern take on earlier forms of comedic drama and the underlying political message.

Polly Davies, November 2023

Photography by Manuel Harlan