Ruth Leon recommends… Pocket Theatre Reviews

The Cabinet Minister at the Menier

If you’re looking for a really good evening in the theatre, I can do you no greater favour than to point you towards Southwark where Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1890 comedy The Cabinet Minister is triumphantly holding the stage at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

My companion and I were both feeling sorry for ourselves on the rainy evening last week when we took our seats in the Choc Factory but we soon cheered up. An amazing array of our best actors – Nancy Carroll, Sara Crowe (why that woman isn’t a household name I’ll never know), Nicholas Rowe, a host of others and our own national treasure, Dillie Keane, take an almost forgotten English farce about the class system and turn it into a polished romp which would lift the spirits of the most jaded or downtrodden audience member.

Leading player Nancy Carroll has herself adapted this Victorian play, taken out all the creaks, and made Pinero’s dialogue sound sparkling and fresh.

She plays the cabinet minister’s wife who has overspent her allowance and has to make unwelcome concessions to her dressmaker while her darling son has run up equally unmanageable gambling debts. Her husband is at risk of losing his cabinet position for  “accepting favours” (sound familiar?) and his darling daughter is unwilling to solve the family’s financial crisis by marrying a tongue-tied Scottish laird, son of a hilarious harridan who speaks for him in an impenetrable but imperious foghorn. That’s Dillie Keane, having the time of her life.

The rest of the plot and characters are many and varied but all carefully balanced so that parallels with our own current political tangles are obvious but tactfully not hit on the head.

Pinero is not Wilde but the loving care which has gone into this production, directed by Paul Foster, and designed by the scrupulous Janet Bird, is demonstrated in every line and movement.

Just as an aside, the current fashion for stripped-down revivals where the actors perform without sets or costumes or props, in time-neutral stagings, in featureless surroundings, is clearly given the lie by this production’s classic and historically correct Victorian setting. And it’s more relevant and much more fun because of it.