Ruth Leon Pocket Review: Habeas Corpus – Menier Chocolate Factory

Habeas Corpus – Menier Chocolate Factory
Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus is an English farce. Except it’s not. Well, not entirely. What it is is a very funny comedy with tragic undertones on the subject of uncontrollable libidos. Sex, the stock-in-trade of every English farce and not a few French ones, drives the stock English characters all of whom are driven by lust, except for the Welsh charlady, who runs the action with her Hoover.

It was Bennett’s genius to write a farce which, if you listen closely, is also, between the jokes, a serious play about England and the English. There are plenty of laughs, and although several of the characters do lose their trousers – it wouldn’t be a farce unless somebody did – they are balanced by a pair of pneumatic breasts that appear and disappear.

What makes this farce bearable, at least in this production by Patrick Marber, is the absence of doors, furniture, or staircases, the stuff of traditional farce, which always slows up the action but not here, where they are all replaced by a handsome coffin.
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The Welsh charlady who is both narrator and a sort of Greek chorus, is wonderfully played by an unrecognisable Ria Jones alongside Jasper Britton as a world-weary doctor in the role originated by Alec Guiness. The rest of Marber’s large cast is equally strong and brilliantly marshalled into a coherent whole. Some of the jokes will mean little to a youthful audience but the oldies will love them.

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