"Blackadder". Green Carnation Productions. Pilch. Review by Sam Wagman

In the spirit of this week’s production, a quick hello from me as Peter Kessler’s answer to Blackadder’s manservant Baldrick. Moving swiftly on…

Green Carnations Productions and Kian Moghaddas bring the iconic Blackadder to the Michael Pilch Studio. The company that have previously given us Narcissus, A Poet and a Scholar, and The Mandrake of Machiavelli returns once again to the annals of history although this time with less intrigue and a lot more jokes about ‘thingy’s’. This abridged version of Blackadder draws on some of its most infamous storylines: Blackadder hosts the puritanic Whiteadders for dinner in Elizabethan England, loses the only copy of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary whilst serving the snorting Prince George, and finds himself under court martial for shooting a pigeon in the trenches of Flanders.

Blackadder is a brave choice for a student production, and I’ll admit my apprehension going in. Whilst this performance doesn’t quite nail the stinging satire of the original series, it is riotously funny.

The nasty stuff out of the way first. I have no great problem with staging a production in thrust, particularly in as intimate a space as the Pilch. It is, however, annoying when the director has insisted on squirrelling away their actors in corners and asides that leave 2/3 of the audience visually bereft. Maybe it’s a minor niggle, but one that repeatedly took me out of Blackadder right when I was in fits of laughter.

Whilst we’re on the subject…the original series of Blackadder functions in many ways as a sequence of skits and vignettes. This production, in the good spirit of trying to retain that same skittish sensibility, needlessly packed the stage with a bed, dining set-up, and an inexplicably long table across the middle. Blackadder is venerated for its performances and in order to elicit the best you can from your actors, you have to give them room to breathe. At various moments in Green Carnations’ production, I worried that a large exhale of breath may cause a calamitous domino effect reminiscent of A Play that Goes Wrong.

That’s not to say that Blackadder’s performances weren’t scratching brilliance – it’s a rarity to see a cast of actors so comedically in tune with one another. Credit must first surely go to Susie Weidmann’s conniving interpretation of Edmund Blackadder himself. When Weidmann wasn’t negotiating her way around the set, she imbued the character with both Atkinson’s famously misplaced snobbery and something of Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart in House of Cards to give us a delicious take on the titular fool. There were points where I hoped Weidmann would have amped up the sneering to avoid being drowned out by the noisy supporting cast and she does fall victim to occasional bouts of imitation. It’s no bad thing to find yourself imitating Rowan Atkinson and it’s a great stab by Weidmann that just toes the line between sincere impersonation and spunky reinterpretation.

My biggest praise must be reserved for Blackadder’s veritable scene-stealer. Lucas Angeli brings us the campiest Lady Whiteadder, Prince George and Lieutenant George you could possibly envisage. His Lady Whiteadder wouldn’t be out of place in Monty Python’s Holy Grail for all her shrillness and slapping. I confess to letting out a Prince George-like snort upon seeing Angeli’s contorted face emerge from Queenie’s (Deborah Acheampong) under-skirt. In a production fairly short of the original series bite, Angeli’s performance provided a more than healthy dose of satire: his delivery of the line ‘Beeeeelzebub’ wouldn’t have been out of place at a Trump rally.

In all the conversation around the new Mean Girls musical/movie/musical-movie, I’ve never seen a better dead-eyed Karen stare than Leah Aspden’s Baldrick. I did feel slightly disappointed at how under-utilized Aspden was in this production, although, I suppose there was limited room on the stage. Alex Still, Tom Pavey, and Alfie Dry shook the sheets as Percy/Captain Darcy, Melchett, and Nursie respectively. With such an expansive cast, however, the quick-witted snappiness of the skits should have felt more readily present; Deborah Acheampong’s Queenie barely got a look-in at the expense of some quite poorly paced scenes towards the middle of the production.

One final commendation should be extended towards Myfanwy Taylor-Bean’s magnificently realised costume design. Period pieces are not an OUDS strong-point and despite Blackadder not demanding historical accuracy, Taylor-Bean provided a much-needed call-back to the original series’ kitschy feel.

It’s a shame that this production of Blackadder suffered from so many points of confused direction given the strength of performances in its ensemble cast. Yet, it’s been a while since Oxford student theatre has seen a comedy with the guts to bring its guard down and silliness up like this; long may it continue.