Perhaps appropriately for a play revolving around bodily functions and enemas, The Hypochondriac hits a bum note. On paper, Lindsay Posner and Lisa Blair’s new staging of Molière’s classic comedy had everything going for it, not least a starry cast and a translation by Richard Bean, best known for his riotous and immensely lucrative version of Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, One Man, Two Guvnors. Bean has form in taking classic plays and updating them in new versions with sly contemporary references and superb sight gags; many of the laughs from the National’s recent staging of London Assurance came from his interpolated jokes, and so hopes were high that he’d do for Molière what he’d done for so many others.
Unfortunately, he was either having an off-day or Posner and Blair’s production is both miscast and underpowered. Or both. His translation of the travails of the tale of the wealthy hypochondriac Argan (Tony Robinson), his unfaithful second wife Beline (Imogen Stubbs), his witty and put-upon servant Toinette (Tracie Bennett) and various quacks, star-crossed lovers and venal gold-diggers feels surprisingly flat and uninspired. It says a lot that the biggest laugh comes from the line ‘With friends like this, who needs enemas?’ Even the big set-piece scenes (yes, Argan undergoes a series of enemas in the second half) have a half-hearted quality, as if the actors weren’t especially interested in the production and were just marking time until their next lucrative TV or film appearance.
A lot of the problems lie with the casting of Tony Robinson as the protagonist. Robinson (whose CV has a surprising lack of recent stage experience) excels at playing small, wheedling characters, such as Baldrick or his Sheriff of Nottingham in Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. But the part of Argan needs an actor who’s comfortable playing in a larger and more gregarious register, who can move between hilarious overstatement and intimate detail with ease. Henry Goodman did a superb job in Posner’s previous staging of the play at the Almeida in 2005, and one longs for another actor in the role – a Roger Allam or even a Mark Rylance. The supporting cast are, as you’d expect, much better (even if Stubbs plays it far broader than she needs to), and Michael Thomas, as Argan’s despairing brother Beralde, gives the evening’s best performance, responding to the increasingly outlandish events with deadpan comic timing and getting some of the few laughs out of very little.
There are also songs, performed by a semi-naked trio of musicians and a suave Andrew Bevis. These inter-act amusements worked extremely well in One Man, Two Guvnors, but here, despite being written by the estimable Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer The Opera), feel as if they’ve been grafted onto the narrative to pad out the evening’s slim running time. Only one, the charmingly titled ‘Blood In My Poo’, manages to be both amusing and memorable, and that in part because the level of vulgarity that it stoops to at least has a certain unabashed grubby panache. Would that the rest of this disappointing play had taken its lead from it.
The Hypochondriac at Richmond Theatre from 24th to 29th November 2014. For more information and tickets visit the website.
