More Money than Sense

Alan Ayckbourn’s production of Evans and Valentine’s 1920s farce Tons of Money opened at the King’s Theatre a day late due to adverse weather conditions. This author wonders whether the troubled journey was really worth the effort in the end.

Amidst our current economic climate one must ask why the King’s thought it a good idea to play host to this adaptation (the word used in the loosest terms, as this ‘new’ production seems entirely dredged up from 1922) of an upper-middle class farce centring around the money troubles of the lord and lady of a country manor.

Dated, snobbish and even borderline racist, this play may have entertained audiences of a bourgeois sensibility in the 1920s, but it is so utterly removed from contemporary culture that one is left feeling indignant that money, time and effort have been spent on such an unworthy cause.

A lavish set depicting the interior of the manor, frames the action on stage, where an array of cliché characters stumble around after each other in various states of confusion and bewilderment, with the audience trailing unwillingly behind them. Caroline Langrishe and Mark Curry play the mindless couple in charge with Christopher Timothy standing by as the long suffering butler Sprules, and Janet Henfry poking her nose in as the meddlesome aunt Miss Mullet. Curry stands out for all the wrong reasons as the Lord of the manor, his cringe-worthy performance reaching no further than that of a pantomime fool – whilst the remaining players’ forced delivery of the dialogue only serves to undermine further an already stale script.

The set design and costume for the piece cannot be criticised, as they evoke the glamour of this era perfectly, but this simply heightens the disappointment of knowing that such sound work has been wasted on such a dismal play.

If we thought we were safe in thinking that this type of theatre was thoroughly consigned to the historical archives, to be touched upon only to highlight its shortcomings, we were sorely mistaken.
Here we have it resurrected and paraded in front of us in one of the city’s foremost theatres. Tons of Money is indeed a farce, and not in the theatrical sense of the word.