It Runs In The Family by Ray Cooney. The Mill at Sonning, Reading RG4 until 12 April 2025, 4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.

Photo Credit: Carla Joy Evans.

It Runs In The Family by Ray Cooney. The Mill at Sonning, Reading RG4 until 12 April 2025,

4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.

“Gales of laughter.”

A whirlwind of deceit, gales of laughter – this revival of Ray Cooney's 1987 farce directed by Ron Aldridge has two splendidly performannces from James Bradshaw and Steven Pinder as a pair of devious doctors trying to get out of a series of mistakes whatever way they can and creating confusion in the process. It is of it's time and there are things which are not really funny any longer but Cooney was not the greatest wordsmith in that his farces are remembered for the wit of the lines but rather for the skill with which he put everything together. The mechanism is impeccable and Bradshaw (Dr Bonney) and Pinder (Dr Moreton) make a perfect double act. Just how the matron, a boy looking for his father and a nurse all end up on the window sill of the Doctor's Common Room in St Andrew' Hospital while the two doctors have to conceal them from a visiting policeman, the big medical personage who has come to attend a conference at which Pinder has to make a speech and both doctors end up dressed as nurses is for you to find out. The plot is complicated – Dr Pinder's ex mistress has arrived to tell him he has a teenage son who wants to meet his father - but the cast have been well drilled, the two doctors are splendidly performed and it is a measure of Aldridge's skill that what is actually not funny any longer – Bill, the wheel chair confined patient with dementia – is still capable of raising a laugh. The performance by Iain Stuart Robinson also helps save the day. But interestingly one of the subterfuges from the original production, which was later staged in 1992, is that nobody impersonates Al Jolson. Blackface is going too fat.This is one of this splendid dinner theatre's better productions – the set is handsome, the supporting cast strong even when required to play stock characters like the nurse who is fanciable, the wife who is on the rampage, the matron who is formidable and inevitably gets randy for all the wrong reasons, not to mention the thick policeman played by Titus Rowe who gets everything wrong as thick policemen always do. The trick is not to up date Cooney but to play the piece for what it is – a machine tooled farce, one of the 19 Cooney wrote during the decades when his plays were performed one after the other in the West End. It did not run for nine years like Run For Your Wife but it did have legs and they can still run.

Sonning has a new dinner deal – the buffet meal has gone and patrons are served at table. But it remains as bargain meal and show – the food is as good as any restaurant, the productions could easily grace any West End stage. The show may merit 4**** but so does the food.

Cast

James Bradshaw – Dr Hubert Bonney

Eric Carte – Sir Willoughby Drake

Oscar Cleaver – Dr Mike Connolly

Elizabeth Elvin – Matron

Rachel Fielding – Rosemary Mortimore

Natasha Gray – Jane Tate

Steven Pinder – Dr David Mortimer

Francis Redfern – Leslie

Iain Stuart Robertson – Bill

Titus Rowe – Police Sergeant

Creatives

Director – Ron Aldridge

Set Designer – Alex Narker

Costume Designer – Natalie Titchener

Lighting Designer – Graham Weymouth