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Sunday I watched One For the Pot -- this is the Shaw Festival production from, I think, the late ‘eighties-- there was a revival at the Shaw in the mid-‘90s, but I seem to remember seeing this tv broadcast as a middle-schooler. Or rather, I caught the third act, was able to tape it on the family VCR, and watched it over and over.
Seeing the entire play for the first time, I’m struck by how provisional the set-up actually is. Oh, Mr. Hardcastle wishing to find Billy Hickory Wood, the long-lost son of his late friend and business partner, and settle part of his fortune upon him, makes sense enough. And Billy having a separated-at-birth twin, Rupert Hickory Wood, raised with a posh accent and little else—well, that’s just the rules of comedy. But half the cast have no real reason to be doing what they’re doing. Jugg the butler cheerfully demands bribes for each assist; but Rupert seems to just get caught up in the inertia of mostly-innocent Billy and his scheming boss Charlie. And there’s no reason for Hardcastle’s arty daughter Amy to fall in love with Rupert at first sight, except that she does.
It helps if you regard it all as not so much a farce plot as a parody of one, with all the tropes amped up. Identical twins raised separately? Let’s throw in a third as the curtain comes down on Act II. There are walk-on characters, offstage characters, and a running gag where one or another of the party guests is always wandering by in search of the ballroom. There are so many plot threads some of them have to be thrown away as soon as they’re introduced: Clifton’s blackmail scheme is foiled almost without effort, because he's made the mistake of being a genuinely unpleasant villain in a story full of loveable comic rapscallions and they have the power of slapstick on their side. This is, after all, a play written in 1959 but set in a vaguely-Wodehousian, vaguely early-1930s country manor. Will somebody get doped up? tied up? forced to don drag in order to seduce a myopic family solicitor? Damn right they will.
By the third act (the part I saw as a kid) the whole thing has achieved escape velocity and everybody’s slamming doors too quickly for the audience to worry about whether any of it makes sense. We’re not watching it for sense, we’re watching for the pleasure of seeing the late Heath Lambert be a human shell game, swapping out accents and ducking into doorways so he can pull a Texas switch with one of his body doubles. Logic is for murder mysteries.
Seeing the entire play for the first time, I’m struck by how provisional the set-up actually is. Oh, Mr. Hardcastle wishing to find Billy Hickory Wood, the long-lost son of his late friend and business partner, and settle part of his fortune upon him, makes sense enough. And Billy having a separated-at-birth twin, Rupert Hickory Wood, raised with a posh accent and little else—well, that’s just the rules of comedy. But half the cast have no real reason to be doing what they’re doing. Jugg the butler cheerfully demands bribes for each assist; but Rupert seems to just get caught up in the inertia of mostly-innocent Billy and his scheming boss Charlie. And there’s no reason for Hardcastle’s arty daughter Amy to fall in love with Rupert at first sight, except that she does.
It helps if you regard it all as not so much a farce plot as a parody of one, with all the tropes amped up. Identical twins raised separately? Let’s throw in a third as the curtain comes down on Act II. There are walk-on characters, offstage characters, and a running gag where one or another of the party guests is always wandering by in search of the ballroom. There are so many plot threads some of them have to be thrown away as soon as they’re introduced: Clifton’s blackmail scheme is foiled almost without effort, because he's made the mistake of being a genuinely unpleasant villain in a story full of loveable comic rapscallions and they have the power of slapstick on their side. This is, after all, a play written in 1959 but set in a vaguely-Wodehousian, vaguely early-1930s country manor. Will somebody get doped up? tied up? forced to don drag in order to seduce a myopic family solicitor? Damn right they will.
By the third act (the part I saw as a kid) the whole thing has achieved escape velocity and everybody’s slamming doors too quickly for the audience to worry about whether any of it makes sense. We’re not watching it for sense, we’re watching for the pleasure of seeing the late Heath Lambert be a human shell game, swapping out accents and ducking into doorways so he can pull a Texas switch with one of his body doubles. Logic is for murder mysteries.
