What perfect nonsense!

What: Jeeves & Wooster in “Perfect Nonsense” Where: Duke of York’s Theatre, Leicester Square, WC2 When: Until 8th March 2014 Price: £15 - £80

As proved by the BBC’s recent TV adaptation of Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books, which any Wodehouse fan would have found painful to watch, it seems to be difficult to transfer Wodehouse’s works to other forms of media. As such, I went into the theatre with mixed expectations. However, the initial signs were promising; I had high hopes when the preliminary mobile phone announcement was done using P.G. Wodehouse quotes. My expectations were more than met. Every conversation of this play elicited laughs and the script never lost sight of its source material. I was particularly delighted to see that Wodehouse’s description of Spode had been included – “a big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces”. Perfect Nonsense is an adaptation of the novel The Code of the Woosters. It’s one of the best known P.G. Wodehouse books, partly due to its television adaptation (the one with the cow-creamer), and the play sticks remarkably closely to the book except in one way; here the premise is that Bertie is putting on a play about his recent weekend at Totleigh Towers, where the original story takes place. Essentially, it is a play withwin a play. This twist works very well, and provides ample opportunities for more humour to be injected. He enlists Jeeves and his Aunt Dahlia’s butler Seppings as the two other members of his cast, and the two butlers, as well as playing themselves, impersonate all the other characters in the play. It gets sillier and sillier (not least when Seppings tries to play the formidable Roderick Spode), culminating in Jeeves playing both parties of a conversation, leaping back and forth across the stage. The one downside of this was that some of the characters seemed flatter than they could have – Spode, for example, lost all sense of menace. On the other hand, Stephen Mangan’s performance as Bertie was the star of the show. The way he interacted with the audience (despite Jeeves’ disapproval) had the whole crowd roaring with laughter, and the feeling that Bertie was actually improvising the whole thing was convincing. Matthew Macfayden was also impressive as Jeeves, managing to remain superbly aloof throughout all his gags. His other roles are equally polished, from Stiffy Byng to Sir Watkyn Basset. One other minor quibble is that not all of the humour reached such a high standard. As well as the original jokes from Wodehouse’s writing, and the humour stemming from Bertie’s endearing inexperience and ineptness at acting, there are other far clumsier gags. Butterfield, the butler at Totleigh Towers, seems to be in the play for the sole purpose of thanking anyone who asks him to do something. This is a joke that is, the first time, only mildly funny. By the end it had definitely started to grate. Thankfully, however, these jokes make up but a small proportion of the play. Overall the show lived up to its name, but not always for quite the right reasons. Casual Wodehouse fans, or those who have only seen Fry and Laurie’s TV show, will love this farce for its imaginative silliness, but more die-hard Wodehousians will miss the cleverness and subtlety of the master of comedy’s sublime wit.