Sinking Farce
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday October 20, 1988
THE English are so good at farces probably because, in personal matters, and especially about sex, they usually say anything but get to the point. Move Over Mrs Markham is a typical farce: a lie told to avoid a sexual embarrassment, to maintain respectability, spirals into a chaos of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, leaving almost everyone half-dressed and running in and out of doors.
The play has its own crazy logic based on the original deceit - and no-one brings the curtain down early simply by coming clean with the truth.
Writers like Orton and even Pinero used the conventions of farce to strip naked pretensions and hypocrisy, but Ray Cooney and John Chapman are interested only in making us laugh. As such, Move Over Mrs Markham requires even more devotion to quicksilver timing, sharp ensemble work and clever sight gags - otherwise it drops like a failed souffle. With a little more cooking time, Charlie Little's production may soon be ready. The talent is there. Belinda Giblin and especially Donald Macdonald, as her staid husband, a publisher of children's books, provide the necessary solid foundations for all the silliness; they are technically slick but believable.
Even their happy marriage is thrown into confusion when Mrs Markham covers for a friend seeking adulterous delights. Via an au pair girl, a fey interior decorator, a leggy telephonist and a bowler-hatted lecher, the plot-twists become labyrinthine. No-one actually fornicates but it's a busy household when Faye Donaldson arrives as a wonderfully countrified but proper spinster acclaimed for her Bow Wow books for children. Here the production, slow to rise in the beginning, becomes more turgid than dizzy and the souffle again begins to sink, dangerously reminding us that Move Over is a vacuous piece of nonsense anyway.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald