French Toast, Riverside Studios review - Racine-inspired satire finds its laughs once up-and-running

It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely for Gallic-Gang Productions to resurrect Jean (La Cage aux Folles) Poiret’s farce Fefe de Broadway, adapted as French Toast.

It’s 1977 and English theatre director, Simon Monk (Ché Walker wearing Jeremy Clarkson’s hair and bearing the public schoolboy’s sense of entitlement), is down on his luck, needing a hit. He lands on a musical version of Racine’s tale of maternal lust, Phèdre, a choice so bizarre that has the whiff of The Producers about it, an impression that grows after a slow start to the show. Initially, his leading lady and backer, French theatre legend, Jacqueline Brémont, is little more than a caricature (Edith Vernes activating full diva mode), as is Reece Richardson’s punk singer Nicky Butler (pictured below with Suzy Kohane, Josie Benson and Paul Hegarty), who is slated to play her son, Hippo in the play within the play. Add in the over-familiar setting of a backstage farce and it was beginning to feel like a long night was in store.

But things got better once the characters were fleshed out and the theme of female empowerment was introduced but it never crushed the comedy (as such hot button topics too often can). Key to that shift in gear was the arrival of Suzy Kohane in Jane Fonda leggings, as American triple threat, Kate Freeman, who was not going to take any shit from Paul Hegarty’s old-school handsy actor, Geoffrey Blythe. She finds an ally in Josie Benson (excellent) as Faye Rose, sidelined, yet again, into the role of an ageing tart with a heart. As director, Marianne Badrichani’s message about the iniquitous impact of The Patriarchy gathers strength, so too does the comedy, a most welcome development. That’s the product of the characters becoming much more rounded, less cardboard cutouts and more human, with light and shade, hopes and fears. The company begin to knit together, find the empathy between different nationalities, different generations and, of course, different genders. The satire slowly morphs into a feelgood romantic comedy, something of a surprise after that pedestrian opening.

It works because Vernes plays the Machiavellian Brémont with more sympathy and Richardson leaves the Johnny Rotten stuff behind and becomes a more sensitive person who can read a room. Walker also turns down the sighing and eye-rolling as the exasperated director, Monk, and we can see how there was something between him and his leading lady back in the day. 

Played all-through in 100 minutes, the show needs more laughs, more bite and more pace to reach its potential as something of an upmarket Carry-On Racine. Not for the first time in a theatre this year, we’re offered just one superb number, Benson showing her musical theatre chops in an Amy Winehousey torch song, finding the woman’s emotion that her male director cannot locate – but we could do with more! There’s plenty of time after all.

The same thing goes for a slightly ramshackle, but highly entertaining, dance number as the troupe bond over critiquing Monk and Brémont’s power struggle as the director and the star/producer clash. The upside of this somewhat tired scenario of bickering thespians is that the theatrical in-jokes can be piled high without losing the audience – well, most of them – because, as in Noises Off, we are familiar with the dynamics.

It’s always good to hear laughter ringing around a room and this farce has its fair share. One feels there may be more to be found later in the run, as the cast loosen up a little and the caricatures of the first half-hour or so are toned down and the poignant moments they find later in the play, gain force as a consequence.

So not quite incroyable, but certainly suffisant for a diverting evening with a ringside seat for a Frogs vs Rosbifs face-off and another of those eternal battles of the sexes. Je vous en prie.

• French Toast at Riverside Studios until 26 October
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk