Upper Lip
The luxury of an English country drawing room is necessarily sparse when recreated in a makeshift performance space just off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, confined to the essentials of a comfortable chair, a well stocked drinks trolley, a coatstand and a banjolele. A banjolele? “Is this instrument befitting a young gentleman?” asks long suffering butler Rinehart, forever antagonised by his sheltered master Samuel Plumwood whom he tries to protect from his own worst indulgences.
Yet inappropriate musical diversions may once again be the least of Samuel’s worries, his misinterpretation of George and Ira Gershwin’s Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off segueing into the revelation that he has become accidentally engaged again and requires Rinehart to extricate him without bringing disgrace in the eyes of the fearsome Aunt Lucretia Fitzpatten, “the devil at the heart of the spider’s web.”
When Rinehart suggests his master attend the Market Chumberley Village Fete he is initially resistant until the resourceful butler admits that he has already formulated a conceit which might indeed save chastity and face, and faster than Samuel can say “put the teapot in the trouser press, the vicar wants a cuppa,” they are on their way. Sabotage, chicanery and broken engagements may be all in an afternoon for an eligible playboy such as Samuel, but the unexpected arrival of suffragette Miss Amelia Chipperfield undermines even the aplomb of Rinehart and in doing so shatters Samuel’s dream that the sun will never set on the empire and the clocks will always strike 1924.
As confrontational presence of Anna Nicholson’s Amelia forces Dominic Rye’s Samuel to confront the concept of a political point of view “further left than a starter fork at a nine course banquet,” it is the reliable presence of Canavan Connolly’s Rinehart who steers the narrative and anchors the absurdities, his unflappable demeanour and diction reminding of the weary resignation of Simon Jones.
To say that Upper Lip is the weakest of the quartet of plays Broken Holmes have presented in recent years is to cruelly undersell it, for their namesake production in which they satirised the legendary creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, their unseaming of Mary Shelley in Stitched Up! and their Wilde take on Oscar when they found themselves In A Handbag, Darkly have all been superlative post-modern analyses not only of the original source materials, meticulously and lovingly researched, but also the relationship audiences share with these indelible icons of British literature.
The play perhaps suffers unfairly in that P G Wodehouse’s Reginald Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are not uppermost in public consciousness, though intimate knowledge of the pair is not a necessity to enjoy the show, simply a familiarity with English country manners and a healthy dose of outrage at class division, for when the uncouth whisper of modernity arrives Robin Johnson’s script quite unexpectedly slips into the subversive territory of a very different British classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets, before revealing that is not a celebration of the idle rich but a very contemporary satire on the disconnect between who live upstairs and those who serve downstairs.
Upper Lip continues at the Space on the Mile until Saturday 23rd August
