A Mad World, My Masters: the funniest play in Stratford in a long while

It’s hard to say anything about this uproarious show without falling into the appalling sexual wordplay which besmirches Sean Foley and Phil Porter’s version of A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton’s satiric comedy of 1605. Putting in its first ever appearance on a Stratford stage, Middleton’s play, as written, is itself as cornucopian a feast of Jacobean rudery as you could imagine. In updating the play to 1950s Soho – shortly before the Christine Keeler scandal began, Foley and Porter have had no need to modernise the scurrility, merely to trim away obscurities so that it scores as riotously, sometimes groaningly so, as it would have done four centuries ago. Nothing so timeless in language, nothing so inexhaustible, as obscenity.

But Middleton’s Mad World isn’t a show by Flanagan and Allen’s Crazy Gang, Benny Hill or a spiced-up Carry On film. It’s a richly layered comedy in which, as one of the characters puts it, all sins are venial but venereal. And these sins, such as they are, are for the most part light-hearted pranks committed by the young against idiotic buffers whose purses and wives can well afford the mischief and who suffer no real harm. The principal prankster is Dick Follywit, understandably put out that his preposterously wealthy grandfather, Sir Bounteous Peersucker (Ian Redford), won’t give him a penny now although in due course will be leaving him everything. The ‘Peersucker’ is a Foley/Porter invention replacing the opaque ‘Progress’ of the original. The fellatious suggestion in the new name remains thankfully unfulfilled, indicating merely that Sir BP’s Achilles’ heel is being overimpressed by the peerage.

No problem then for grandson Dick to visit in the guise of a fictitious Lord Overmuch (‘in great demand of late with our City bankers’) and thereby make off (I nearly wrote ‘Madoff’) with every valuable in sight while also escaping the threatened display of Sir BP’s organs or the trumpeted sight of his ‘****’ — and hens (not that anyone in the audience heard the last two words).