The Cabinet Minister, Menier Chocolate Factory review - sparkling tour de force of a farce

The stock of the late 19th century playwright Arthur Wing Pinero has just received a significant boost, thanks to the brilliant work of the actress Nancy Carroll – not only as a superb performer but as a dab hand with an adaptor’s pen. 

Not seen in London since 1991, Pinero’s 1890 farce The Cabinet Minister has emerged as a tour de force in her hands: sparkling with wit, vibrancy and knowingly naughty innuendo. Trollope would probably have turned the same material into a weightier, more mordant commentary on the British class system, but here the text is intent on fleet-footed fun, firing off barb after barb about the social order and scurrying nimbly on to unleash the next one.

The audience can tell they are in for a treat from the first minute the cast arrive, bearing musical instruments they will accompany themselves with throughout, as they sing: “Money, money, money…”. The wife of the Cabinet Minister, Lady Kitty Twombley (Carroll, pictured below), has run out of it, having indulged her extravagant taste in fine dresses and lavish interiors. (The production duly looks exquisite.) Now the bills have come due, and she has already spent the funds supplied by her husband to meet other expenses. This makes her prey to the wiles of her modiste, Fanny Lacklustre (Phoebe Fildes/violin), who speaks with forked tongue, posh or plebeian depending on the company she’s in. She is offering the services of her brother, essentially as a loan shark, as Kitty rightly guesses. What to do? 

A giddy dance is set in motion as Kitty tries to conceal her plight from “Pa”, her upright husband (Nicholas Rowe/flute), while trying to steer her two children towards propitious marriages. The fate of ending up in an unhappy union is writ large by their stuffed-shirt cousin Keith (Dom Hodson), who is already at war with his wife over the future career of their firstborn (a son still in nappies): politics or the army? 

For Kitty’s daughter Imogen (Rosalind Ford/cello) an arranged marriage with a great tree trunk of a highland lord, Sir Colin Macphail (Matthew Woodyatt/accordion), will entail living with his antique mother (Dillie Keane/piano, pictured below with Sara Crowe) in a Scottish castle, with little to do except admire the local mountain peak. And besides, Imogen’s childhood pal Valentine (George Blagden/guitar) has returned from his latest boho jaunt in a farflung place and is much better company, despite smelling, Kitty’s butler announces, of “damp animal”.

Under the direction of Paul Foster, the cast devour their juicy dialogue, models of how to place emphases in all the right places. In Lord Twombley’s busybody sister Dora, Dowager Countess of Drumdurris, Sara Crowe creates a china-doll-faced martinet, brimming with “motives”. She’s a woman with a crisp delivery who pronounces “why” “ph-why” and can get laughs from the way she says “kipper”. Dillie Keane, bent double and looking the spit of the old Queen Victoria, is all incoherence and cod-brogue by comparison, somebody whose sole topic of conversation seems to be praising her local mountain’s beauty at different times of day. Pa, typically, is ramrod straight and taciturn, weary of the House and its shenanigans, the only person onstage who seems to have a job.

The driving force of this motley crew is Carroll’s Kitty, a non-stop source of delight. A woman who has married up in bagging Twombley, she is an anarchic force, existing somewhat to the side of the upper echelon into which she has landed, bold but scatty. The worst fate in her world would be, as Pa is threatening, for him to resign his post and retire to the country, where they would pass the time growing vegetables. Never has a turnip been more amusing. 

Something in the range and versatility of Carroll’s voice echoes Judi Dench’s. She can be all soft winsome charm, then pivot to an imperious snap with pinpoint-sharp comic timing. Her asides are mercurial; her way with innuendo, hilarious. On the page, suggesting her cello-playing daughter should have a “little pluck before tea” could go horribly wrong. Here it brings the house down. She also has a showstopping retort to Fanny Lucklustre’s wide-boy bruvver Bernard (Laurence Ubong Williams) – who has grandiosely dubbed himself St John for mixing with the upper crust – when he announces he has “never ‘ad an ‘eadache, don’t know how it’s spelt”. 

There is a physicality to Carroll’s comedy too, most notable in the silent tussle she engages in with St John when his manipulation of her very definitely crosses a line, and she attempts to push him to the floor, the better to strangle him. And she can do the best, and funniest, miffed flounce in the business. 

Foster’s direction keeps the action flowing, punctuated with bursts of music from the cast to underscore what’s in the script. In the spirit of all great comedy, things conclude with a dance and neatly tied-up plot lines, but not before Carroll's adaptation has added a kicker to bring the piece up to date. It's an inspired and refreshing revamp. Those who find life too onerous right now should hurry off to the Menier at once. 

• The Cabinet Minister at Menier Chocolate Factory until 16 November
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