MPs behaving badly in Ray Cooney’s classic farce

It’s Her Turn Now, at The Mill at Sonning, until November 18

Review by DEREK ANSELL

RAY Cooney’s well-known farce Run or Your Wife has been around for 33 years. Starting out in 1990 as Whose Wife is it Anyway, it gradually metamorphosed into Out of Order and then a cross-gender version, Run For Your Man.

Then it became Run or Your Wife. Now the original play has been adapted by MichaelJ Barfoot as It’s Her Turn Now.

Playing a junior Tory minister, Mrs Willey, portrayed by Elizabeth Elvin, is having an affair with Labour MP John Worthington (Raphael Bar). Naturally things start to go spectacularly wrong as soon as they arrive at the Westminster hotel and Willey has to call in her Personal Private Secretary Georgia Pigden, played by Felicity Duncan.

All of which sets off a whole range of lies, deception and subterfuge, orchestrated by Willey and carried out by Pigden.

Elvin and Duncan are excellent as the conniving pair, feeding off each other in a whole raft of comic turns. Barfoot has adapted the play, not just as a play seen from a feminine viewpoint but bringing it neatly into the present day.

After Willie has gone through most of her lying, changing and deceiving patterns somebody asks her what she hopes to get out of this. ‘Well, I might get to be Prime Minister,’ she replies. Sound familiar?

As to the play, it was very funny, a typical farce with doors and cupboards opening and closing constantly, people endlessly coming and going, with great timing all round.

In addition to the usual farcical set-up we had a window that kept closing noisily every time it was opened and a dead body that moved around with remarkable ease, controlled and moved by Raphael Bar as Worthington and Felicity Duncan as Pigden, the latter even arranging some ventriloquist moves of his arms, legs and nodding head.

A good cast, including Jules Brown, Eric Carte, Harry Gostelow and James Holmes, as an on the make waiter, played it up to the hilt for laughs. Jules Brown as Nurse Foster had fun being partially seduced by Pigden. Michelle Morris played Worthington’s wife Tracey and Charlie Parker -Swift was more animated than you might expect from a dead body. It’s not what you think!

Brisk pacing, down to director David Warwick, was just right.