Mates in Chelsea review – filthy-rich farce lets the upper classes off lightly
Rory Mullarkey’s eat-the-rich comedy attempts to illuminate the ridiculousness of Britain and the unfailing bias towards the unaccountable upper classes. But it does so with a style that rarely wavers from a grating hamminess, leaving you hoping the rich will get eaten much faster than the run time promises.
Sending up the cares and customs of the super wealthy, the play focuses on a demanding posh kid in his “lad pad” in Chelsea. Laurie Kynaston is the rotten, spoilt viscount Theodore “Tug” Bungay, told by his mother Lady Agrippina (a sniffy, dispassionate Fenella Woolgar) that he’s being cut off and his beloved countryside castle is being sold to an on-the-run Russian oligarch. Cue the whole gang lolloping around the castle impersonating the potential buyer, each one attempting to out-Spartacus the other with vaguely Russian accents and slicked back hair to, by turns, save or scupper the castle’s future.
While the storyline gets increasingly absurd, there is a sincere lack of depth or growth throughout. The deliberate shallowness – the plastic-seeming set, the stock characters, the nonexistent chemistry, the predictable plot twists – makes it hard to invest in what’s inevitably going to happen to them all, and the broad parodic comedy doesn’t do enough legwork to hold the action together for the whole ride. The story unravels surprisingly slowly, with tiresome arguments taking up much of the stage time and Sam Pritchard’s direction frequently having the cast hanging around awkwardly.
Related: ‘A fantasy of privilege’: why do I, a socialist playwright, love to watch the rich?
The cast put in good performances, particularly George Fouracres as Tug’s awful best friend Charlton “Charlie” Thrupp who sees a “cultural adviser” whenever he travels somewhere new, and Amy Booth-Steel garners laughs as Mrs Hanratty, Tug’s Marxist maid. There’s a cracking use of pyrotechnics too.
But the script overworks itself to show rather than tell, not trusting the audience to get the jokes without hammering them in. This makes much of the humour feel obvious and smug rather than cutting and clever. Mates in Chelsea stems from a funny concept but in the large space downstairs at the Royal Court, it feels like a satirical comedy sketch that has been overstretched to vapidity in order to fit a full length play.
• At the Royal Court theatre, London, until 16 December
