fringe: box and cox

Mrs Bouncer has a room to let. Mr Box is at work all night and home all day, Mr Cox is at work all day and home all night. Mrs Bouncer sees an opportunity. So long as they never meet, what could possibly go wrong.

Box and Cox is a one act farce written by John Maddison Morton (based on a French original) in 1847 and performed in 2018 by Maniacal Arts.

Or more specifically by Jake McNamara as Box, Declan Carter as Cox and Emma Austin as Mrs Bouncer.

The three of them are wonderfully over the top and ridiculous in that Victorian farcical way but everything they do suits the material perfectly. Carter is wonderfully pompous and McNamara is equal parts sly and dimwitted.

I do wish that we'd seen a little bit more of Austin, as she regularly stole every scene she was in, which is no small feet up against McNamara and Carter.

The play itself holds up impressively well for being over 170 years old and reminded me more than once of something like The Importance of Being Earnest (although perhaps not as sharply written as Wilde, but still good), with all the kind of ridiculous happenstance and coincidences that abound in farces.

The staging is simple but effective, I did wonder initially if we, the front row of the audience, weren't a little close to everything, but once things started it didn't feel that way at all.

yani's rating: 4 lucifers out of 5