A spiralling maze has been painted throughout the stage flooring and a metallic flowery cover hangs overhead. Within the nook, a Hepworth-esque sculpture suggests a crouched bare physique or maybe a mouth gaping open in a scream. Simon Daw’s summary set is pitched someplace between charming and threatening, by no means fairly revealing itself. It’s the perfect backdrop for Marivaux’s advanced 1724 comedy The False Servant, which is ostensibly about love – however is de facto all about cash.
Martin Crimp’s gleaming translation, which premiered on the Nationwide in 2004, manages to be each carefree but exquisitely managed. There’s a canny ease about Crimp’s dialogue, which makes gentle work of Marivaux’s intricate plot, filled with deception, disguise and double-crossing characters. The wordplay by no means feels overplayed and solely sometimes attracts consideration to itself with a neatly timed rhyming couplet or a really foolish apart.
Will Brown revels in his function because the self-serving servant Trivelin who, because the character with the least to lose, will get to have essentially the most enjoyable. There are echoes of James Corden in One Man, Two Guvnors as Brown scurries concerning the stage – a hand in virtually all the pieces however with management of completely nothing. Brown shamelessly makes like to the viewers, charming us and cosying as much as us each time he can.
Paul Miller, who directed Marivaux’s The Lottery of Love in 2017, highlights the seductive attract of cash. The male characters fall down on their knees not for lovers however for dosh: Trivelin pants like a canine for cash and within the ultimate scene, the dastardly Lelio (a sneering Julian Moore-Cook dinner) rolls across the flooring, greedy desperately for a wedding contract he can now not money in.
Barely disappointing is the fuzzy context during which the gender dynamics are performed out. Chevalier (Lizzy Watts), the lady on the centre of Marivaux’s gnarled romance, is disguised as a person all through. Watts wears a pointy gray swimsuit, which isn't 18th century however doesn’t really feel modern both; there’s a modern-ish aesthetic to all of the costumes. Whereas it’s enjoyable to look at Watts overrated with the facility as she struts about, fingers thrust in her pockets, it appears like a missed alternative to have a very fashionable tackle gender id and to place Marivaux’s fascinating collision of the sexes right into a post-#MeToo period.
On the Orange Tree theatre, London, till 23 July.
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