Predictable humour with bags of style streamed live to Warwick Arts Centre

FARCE is not really my thing and, to be perfectly honest, there were times when I was less than overwhelmed with this National Theatre performance of The Magistrate, streamed live to Warwick Arts Centre.

But for all that, I could recognise the comic genius and sublime timing of American actor John Lithgow, playing the oh-so respectable English magistrate, and his stage wife Nancy Carroll, fresh from her Olivier-award winning performance in After the Dance.

As Nancy herself explained in a pre-performance interview, if she turns her head a certain way at one precise moment, she’ll get a laugh from the audience. If she turns a split second later, she won’t.

We also hear from director Timothy Sheader, who pretends to be overawed by the fact that instead of the usual theatre audience, this production was going out to hundreds of thousands of people sitting in cinemas all over the world.

Written in 1885, The Magistrate was a humorous melodrama set around rigid Victorian morals - you can see the denouement coming a mile away but can enjoy it simply for its physicality and the expressions, seen so much more closely, on the faces of the actors.

The story centres around a white lie, told by Agatha, the magistrate’s wife, which has had rather a dramatic effect on her “teenaged” son .... you can almost guess the rest.

But then 14-year-old Cis Farringdon is played with such gusto by Joshua McGuire that he makes you smile in spite of yourself.

There are newly written ‘period’ songs to add extra flavour to this revival and I did appreciate the occasional update to those 130-year-old jokes, particularly the gag at the end.

And although you’re sitting in the cinema, you really do have the feeling of being among a London theatre audience and want to join in the clapping with them.

Barbara Goulden