Upstairs, downstairs

Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’. The theatre boasts a Resident Academic and an eccentric register of patrons including ‘Victoria Biggs, Euan Borland and the Duchess of Cambridge (pub)’.

Currently it’s sifting the 1920s for treasure. Others have prospected here before. Ben Travers’s bourgeois farces no longer entertain us because middle-class morality has changed too much in the past 90 years. Frederick Lonsdale may stand a better chance. His play, On Approval, opened in the West End in 1927 and ran for over a  year. It was twice filmed. It’s a neat, witty and slightly contrived comedy in which hard-up aristocrats compete to marry low-born women with pots of cash. This inverted arrangement — toffs grovelling to commoners — is perfectly attuned to the democratic values of the 1920s. Naturally it tickles our sensibilities too.

Lonsdale’s premise has the familiar lay-out of a BBC sitcom: four bickering eccentrics are trapped in a domestic setting. We meet George, 12th Duke of Bristol, an arrogant and penniless parasite who faces bankruptcy unless he can marry Helen, the daughter of a wealthy pickle magnate. (Pickle! The details are beautifully calculated to corrode the dignity of the upper classes.) Meanwhile George’s best friend Richard, a hard-up plodder, has caught the eye of Maria, a rich widow whose earnings would guarantee him a life of luxury. But she insists that he prove his worth by accompanying her for a month at her sleet-lashed Gothic castle in Scotland.