The Man In The White Suit
Written and Directed by Sean Foley
Music & lyrics by Charlie Fink
Set and costue design by Micharl Taylor
Lighting designer Mark Henderson
Sound and incidental music by Ben & Max Ringham
Choreography by Lizzie Gee
World premiere
Bath Theatre Royal
Saturday 21st September 2019, 14.30
CAST
Stephen Mangan – Sidney Stratton
Kara Tointon – Daphne Birnley
Sue Johnston – Mrs Watson his landlady, washboard
with
Richard Cordery – Mr Birnley
Richard Durden – Sir John
Ben Deery – Michael Corland, owner of Corland Textiles
Rina Fatania – Brenda Highthorpe
Katie Bernstein – Babs / Barmaid / Woman worker / Lady diner / Nurse Gammidge
Delroy Atkinson – Hoskyns
Eugene McCoy- Knudson / Maitre D / Hill
Matthew Durkan – Jimmy Rigton, guitar, piano
Oliver Kaderbhai- Bill Wilkins/ Anderson / Chef / Chauffeur / Drums
Elliot Rennie – double bass, worker
Katherine Toy – accordion, guitar, worker
This is going to be huge. It occupies the One Man Two Guvnors territory, in that there is a lot of music, much played by “Jimmy Rigton & his group” but I wouldn’t call it a musical, though the cast might join in choruses and dance. The songs are written by Charlie Fink of Noah & The Whale. The set design by Michael Taylor is astonishing, and certainly highly expensive. There’s a cast of fourteen.
It’s starting off in Bath (we saw it on the last day of the pre-London run), then going to a London run at Wyndham’s Theatre starting next week, 27th September then running right through to January 11th. I very much doubt that will be the last of it, but as Stephen Mangan is so central to the concept, you should see it in this 2019 / 2020 first version. At the point in writing, the only reviews were Bath local ones, and there were few pictures available. (More added after London reviews)
Free Cover-mount DVD. They did two weeks of Ealing comedy
It’s based on the Ealing Comedy The Man in TheWhite Suit from 1951. They have recycled the poster design too:
The 1951 film poster
Sean Foley has previous with Ealing Comedy, writing and directing the successful stage version of The Ladykillers as well as another well-loved comedy classic Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, which also starred Stephen Mangan.
Sidney Stratton (Stephen Mangan) is a Cambridge educated research chemist, in Lancashire working for Corlands, a textile company (Ah! Courtaulds!) Research and floor sweeping. It’s all going wrong and he doesn’t really fit down at the pub. He lives with a landlady, Mrs Watson (Sue Johnstone). He gets the sack. Daphne Birnley (Kara Tointon) is Michael Corland’s fiancée, though he’s far more interested in a merger with her dad’s textile company, Birnleys. Sidney gets to set up research at Birnleys and invents the fabric which will never age and stain.
The white suit is revealed nd ll celebrate. Kara Tointon as Daphne, Stephen Mangan as Sidney Stratton.
The result is the white suit. But hold on, if it never ages or wears out, what will happen to the textile industry? The bosses (Mr Birnley and Michael Corland) are informed of this by Sir John, the head of the textile manufacturer’s association. They have to stop him. The workers come to the same conclusion and everyone combines to stop him.
It’s an incredible piece for Stephen Mangan. It’s full on energy from start to finish. It’s a study on 1950s and 1960s and 1970s comedy roles, where the hapless hero had a succession of awful physical tasks and violent things happen to him … Norman Wisdom, Charlie Drake (seriously injured doing it too), Michael Crawford in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em. More than anyone, I thought he channelled Brian Rix, not only in the Whitehall farces, but on film too. My favourite TV comedy of the last decade is Episodes. This year, we’ve watched all of Hang Ups (which he wrotew) twice.
Stephen Mangan as Sidney Stratton
Stephen Mangan suffers multiple explosions, flying, being punched, falling, banging into doors, falling downstairs, trying to fight with a heavy sword. One explosion leaves him with burned and tattered clothes and you think ‘How did they do that in full view in just a split second?’ He has to pretend to be Dutch, and also moonlights as an allegedly French waiter. The scene where he tries to clean up the mess he’s made of other’s clothing is tears down the face funny.
The restaurant scene
Kara Tointon has a costume change … high fashion 1950s … every time she appears. The fiancé is of no interest to her, nor she to him. Her dance seduction scene with Stephen Mangan (he is VERY Brian Rix in this) is one of the funniest things in a hilarious play, especially when he lurches into the radio and changes the tune. At the end, she does some incredible athletic dance moves too. A worthy co-star.
The dance seduction scene
Mr Birnley (Richard Cordery) is a Trouble At Mill creation, huge, rolling his Lancashire vowels to great effect, boring everyone in the story with his repetitive monologue on the success of Birnley Textiles.
Sue Johnston as Mrs Watson, Rina Fatania as Brenda, Stephen Mangan as Sidney
Sue Johnstone gets billing up there with Mangan and Tointon, but Mrs Watson, the Lancashire landlady, is a comparatively minor role (with her Royle Family accent), but as anticipated, beautifully realized especially as she confides that her life dream is to go to Blackpool. She has never been. She and Blackpool are both in Lancashire …. She also plays skiffle washboard in one song.
The set has to switch at high speed from local pub, to Mrs Watson’s front parlour, to the factory gates, to a posh “French” restaurant, to the factory floor, to a drive in the country, to Mr Birnley’s semi-stately home to a bedroom upstairs, to a talent show in the local theatre. I think I missed a few.
The drive in the country
The set is the sort of elaboration that is the trademark of the Olivier Theatre at The National. They use a revolve, but other rooms emerge from the sides, backgrounds descend. For the drive in the country with Daphne a whole section folds down to reveal an MG sports car with funny moving road behind. Mangan is brilliant at the physical stuff with the car … Daphne is driving, he’s holding on. No plot spoilers. His escape from the locked room down the tower is very funny.
They must have switched that fold down section in the interval, because in part two it folds down to reveal the bedroom in the Birnley mansion where they have locked Sidney away. The great chase through the streets is done on a projected Lowrey Lancashire set with small models. Oh, yes, projection is used a lot.
L to R: Sue Johnstone (seated with washboard), Matthew Durkan as Johnny Rington, Oliver Kaderbhai drums, Kara Tointon, Stephen Mangan
They’ve shifted the story from 1951 to 1956, because that allows them to get the skiffle group to come in at regular intervals and perform a song. There’s a lot of fine recorded music too, and a couple of times it segues from recorded to live. I wish they’d listed the live songs, which is what a musical would do. The song Chemistry stuck in my head anyway. I hope they put out a CD (EP length) for the London production.
If I’m going to be hyper-critical, it lacks the unpredictability and risk that (say) the under the stairs scene had in The Ladykillers. Audience interaction is very limited – they address (fictional) members of the audience a few times … Mr Mortimer and Mrs Hardcastle. It would be good to have given Mangan a couple of minutes to play around with the audience and improvise in the way that James Cordern was given space in One Man Two Guv’nors.
But let’s not gild the lily. Mangan exudes such a good vibe and shares it in a way I can only compare with classic Brian Rix … though Mangan is more disciplined and able. We’ve seen him play the heavy gangster in The Birthday Party which was totally different. The centre final bows were Mangan and Tointon, deservedly.
My rating, 5 stars *****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
On its London transfer, after my Bath review. Had it lost its edge?I doubt that. I thought the critics snotty on broad comedy. It doesn’t change my rating, but then I am a fan of Whitehall farce and this is a supreme example of the style with far more elaborate staging. Interestingly, the website for Wyndhams has customer reviews, averaging four stars.
The remark on capitalism and it not being a funny story below says more about the writer than the play, and it gave us a laugh. There is increasingly a divide between what plays successfully outside London and what plays in London. In London, theatre has to tick so many boxes on gender switching, ethnicity and seriousness. Sadly, London gets far too big a share of both Arts Council money and commercial theatre (which this is).
But … we all referenced “One Man Two Guv’nors.”
3 star
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times ***
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
Yet it would take a curmudgeon to resist the production’s puppyish and tireless resolve to keep you grinning. That’s abetted by the surprise-springing design concoctions of Michael Taylor (Ladykillers’ secret weapon). And Mangan …gives us affable technicolour personability that contrasts well with Guinness’s monochrome eccentricity … Overall, none of it seems calculated to leave an indelible impression. Yet for those in need of diverting fluff, it should suit well enough.
Michael Billington, Guardian ***
Foley’s production and Michael Taylor’s design also brim with invention: a car suddenly materialises like an unfolding bed, the boss’s baronial mansion is filled with sword fights, miniaturised figures engage in a chase across a Lowryesque landscape. It is all hectically and boisterously theatrical but what I missed was the movie’s quietly satirical portrait of a sclerotic society in which it appeared nothing would ever change.
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail ***
Londonist ***
Also the relentless willingness of the cast to drop trousers, make fart noises and crash into doors. But, hang on, wasn’t the skiffle music and physical comedy what made One Man, Two Guvnors such a hit — this feels like the fourth-flimsy carbon copy bashed out on a fifties Remington. … Also borrowing from One Man Two Guvs, there’s a bit of fourth-wall breaking, often clumsily by Sue Johnston’s phoning-it-in performance as a camp washerwoman, along with some lame political gags about proroguing parliament and Brexit. None of which are half as ironic as the whole production’s sneering stereotypes about thick working class northerners, which are worthy of an Islington dinner party.
2 star
Kate Kellaway, Guardian **
It’s a theatrical farce that sings so hard for its supper (including skiffle songs by Charlie Fink, played by Matthew Durkan) that it seems churlish to be underwhelmed. But the flimsy narrative has nowhere near enough tension to keep one interested.
Chris Waywell, Time Out **
‘The Man in the White Suit’ is a story about how capitalism condemns every link of its food chain to co-dependency. If one fails, they all do, and in the ’50s, the UK’s textile industry was about to be history, taking whole cities down with it. That’s basically not a funny story, and to play it just for laughs makes this version feel way more out of touch than its 70-year-old source material.
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage **
The pace is always slightly too fast or too slow for the gags; a fight with heavy swords starts promisingly but ends up laboured; there’s an awful lot of shouting and mugging with the odd prorogation and Brexit joke thrown in. A plea for sustainability and sense in our consumption rears its head but is then lost in the general mayhem. Good actors are almost entirely wasted (Sue Johnston as Stanley’s landlady) or pushed too far over the top (Richard Cordery as the choleric mill owner; Rina Fatania as a trade union activist). Subtlety and true wit, there is none.
John Nathan, Metro **
Yet, despite its on-trend sustainability theme, the show only fleetingly rises above the level of mildly amusing. Foley’s trademark visual gags now have a dog-eared feel to anyone who saw them in his Morecambe and Wise-inspired The Play What I Wrote and the script is laboured.
Not using star ratings:
David Benedict, Variety
The production’s real debt is not to the original film but to the transatlantic smash One Man Two Guv’nors. But that came with the winning advantages of a far sharper script and meticulous direction by Nicholas Hytner and Cal McCrystal. Comparisons may be invidious, but copying the former show’s device of a skiffle band actively invites them — and not to the current show’s advantage.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
SEAN FOLEY (director, writer)
Present Laughter, by Noel Coward, Chichester 2018
The Miser, by Moliere, 2017
The Dresser, by Ronald Harewood, Chichester 2017
The Painkiller, Francis Veber, Kenneth Branagh Company 2016
Jeeves & Wooster in “Perfect Nonsense”, tour 2013
The Ladykillers, 2011
STEPHEN MANGAN
The Birthday Party, by Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter Theatre, 2018
Birthday, by Joe Penhall, Royal Court, 2012 (Ed)
Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, Brighton (pre-London) 2013
Rules for Living by Sam Holcoft, Dorfman, National Theatre 2015
KARA TOINTON
Twelfth Night, RSC 2017 (Olivia)
RICHARD CORDERY
Sweet Bird of Youth, by Tennessee Williams, Chichester 2017
BEN DEERY
A Mad World My Masters, RSC 2013
DELROY ATKINSON
Present Laughter, by Noel Coward, Chichester 2018
MATTHEW DURKAN
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Old Vic 2017
Peter Viney's Blog 
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