Dressing Gown

Bedroom Farce

Dressing Gown

by Andrew Cartmel

Take Note Theatre and Thursday Theatre at the Theatre at the Tabard, Chiswick until 27^th July

Review by Andrew Lawston

It’s the sound that everyone dreads in the morning – the doorbell ringing before we’re quite ready to face the new day.  And so it is for Ash, the somewhat put-upon young theatre director who leads Andrew Cartmel’s new play at the Tabard Theatre, Dressing Gown.

Misunderstandings, innuendo, paranoia, and a parade of awkward but witty conversations ensue after producer Sheridan, or Dan, walks in on Ash in his dressing gown one morning and, eventually, accuses him of having an affair with the leading lady in the play they are working on, The Bearded Vulture.  The leading lady in question being Dan’s own girlfriend.

After Dan eventually leaves, Ash prepares to get dressed.  But the front door opens again.  And again.  And again.

This one act farce crackles with energy as it zips past in barely an hour and ten minutes, its inciting incident nothing more sinister than a misheard conversation in a canteen.  Under Jenny Eastop’s direction, the cast are tight on their cues, and perfect in their timing.  The simple living room set, littered with scribbled-on script pages from The Bearded Vulture, gives the cast ample room to move freely, and the action moves all over the Tabard’s small stage.

Jamie Hutchins effectively leads the cast as Ash, an exasperated and more than slightly fastidious man caught up in his colleagues’ melodramas, who wants nothing more than to get dressed and get on with his day.  Any character who wears a dressing gown throughout a play is bound to be compared to Arthur Dent of Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, but Ash is far more interested in making coffee than tea.  Despite Ash’s constant frustration and irritation, Hutchins gives an assured performance, delivering witty asides even when being accused of philandering, or pleading with various members of his production not to walk out.

In one key moment, Ash phones his lead actor who has walked out, and talks him around in a virtuoso piece of verbal manipulation, highlighting the fact that despite the farce going on around him, he is a highly capable professional.

Dan, Ash’s best friend and slick producer, in jacket and jeans, also walks a fine line as he portrays a man who leaps to paranoid conclusions on the flimsiest (but also funniest) of pretexts, but who is also a loyal friend and essentially decent, and committed to the production.  His pointed non-apology after accusing Ash of sleeping with his girlfriend is both funny, and a moment of quiet desperation as he silently pleads with Ash to drop the matter.

The leading lady who has instigated all this drama is played by Rosie Edwards with vivacious energy – part suspicious girlfriend, and part insecure actor.  Even in the middle of a blazing argument with Ash, she will still sit and beg for compliments on her performance, and Edwards gives the character so much energy that her later extreme behaviour seems plausible enough.  Edwards makes Layla fun, and there’s always a suggestion that her tongue is firmly in her cheek, even in her most hysterical moments.

The writer of The Bearded Vulture, Jenna, completes the cast.  Apparently a thoroughly trendy young playwright, Jenna is furious with actors who are paraphrasing her dialogue in rehearsal – which must have made for some interesting moments from Andrew Cartmel and Jenny Eastop during Dressing Gown’s own rehearsals – and creates a secondary source of anxiety for Ash as she threatens to pull the plug on his production, and then indirectly provokes his leading man into leaving.  It’s probably fair to say that Jenna has the least character development of the four, with her colourful t-shirt doing a degree of heavy lifting in informing the audience as to her character, but Freya Alderson gives a spirited performance that certainly makes her an equal partner in the ensemble.

Cartmel’s dialogue sprinkles character details throughout the play without any clunky exposition, and if certain developments towards the end are perhaps signposted rather clearly, that’s due to a diligent observance of the genre’s demands rather than any fault with a clever, witty, and well-structured script.

Andrew Lawston, July 2024

Photography by Matt Hunter