Retro rubbish

Joy of joys. Huge, fat, inebriating doses of adulation have been squirted all over Josie Rourke’s first show as the châtelaine of the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a breakthrough production in many ways. You have to break through the treacly tides of critical approval. Then you have to break through the Donmar’s overenthusiastic heating system, which sends unwary play-goers to sleep long before their bedtimes. Finally you have to break through the script — The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, one of those neglected classics that everyone agrees is marvellous and no one bothers to read. Hardly surprising. We’re in Herefordshire in 1706. The Duke of Marlborough is abroad fighting the French while squads of army martinets scour the English countryside duping bumpkins into joining the service. One of the con men, the philandering Captain Plume, is betrothed to a gorgeous heiress who disguises herself as a soldier in order to spy on him.

Plots like this, of course, require one to suspend, throttle or otherwise detain one’s disbelief for a couple of hours. But my incredulity is too stubborn a beast to be shunted off and told to keep quiet. It keeps pointing out awkward things. Plume, a professional swindler, is the last person to be fooled by a drag act that wouldn’t convince a simpleton with a guide dog. And, rather strangely, the heiress-disguised-as-a-soldier (Nancy Carroll) has left out one crucial detail: the disguised-as-a-soldier bit. She strides around like a catwalk model with her blonde tresses, peachy complexion and curvy figure in plain view. Gosh, it’s hard work. You have to keep persuading yourself to stop noticing blatant absurdities. Imagine going to church because you enjoy pretending to believe in God.