Theatre Fenella's Farce

by Derek Mahon Fish Out of Water, at the Greenwich, is an adaptation by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin of Feydeau's La Main Passe. Bedroom farce demands split-second timing, and this the cast didn't quite manage. Perhaps, playing to a three-quarters empty house at five in the afternoon, they were conserving energies, or concealing boredom. Visually impressive, the mechanics of the production are laborious and underrehearsed: a gun goes off seconds after the trigger is squeezed, and the ' accidental' switching-on of a tape-recorder demands visible muscular pressure. Fenella Fielding is the life and soul of the party. A married woman, the object of several men's determined adoration, she flutters her eyelashes and blurs her consonants as only she knows how; but there's a lack of conviction there somewhere. Type-cast for the inscrutable cadences of Wilde, her talents are lost on the fatuous triviality of Feydeau. Too often she is left floundering with nothing to contribute to a conversation among her husband's

friends and can only simper aimlessly. More at home here were Glyn Owen as Hubertin, deftly impersonating a stand-up comic in his wild check, and David Stoll as Coustouillu, a veritable Demosthenes in the Chamber of Deputies but incapable of a coherent sentence in the presence of Miss Fielding's Mme Chanal, with whom he is abjectly, even cretinously in love, bringing bunches of asparagus and melons the size of beach-balls as tokens of his devotion. There is a competent, if rather off-hand performance by Gerald Harper as Offenbaque ('not the composer, the seducer '); but a general tightening-up of tempo is needed all round, with rather less backslapping-and-wincing. Sets and costumes are sumptuously Edwardian. The black-andwhite motif even stretches to an albino chihuahua. Phil Woods's In Place of Strife, at the beat-up little Unity Theatre in Camden Town, takes off from the recent Industrial Relations Bill. John Mann, on trial for provoking industrial unrest, conducts his own defence and calls his witnesses from the...