One Man, Two Guvnors

Music Box Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

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It would be wrong to suggest that this comedy import from London will merely make you chuckle, said Brendan Lemon in the Financial Times. On opening night, “the man next to me was so convulsed with laughter that I feared his going into cardiac arrest,” and I wasn’t far behind him. Loosely based on a 1743 play that mixed stock characters, music, and improvised dialogue, Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors is set in 1960s Brighton and contains a nonstop stream of Anglicisms and U.K-specific references. But London theater observers shouldn’t have worried that U.S. audiences “wouldn’t fully groove to the beat” of the show’s humor. The production runs a bit long, but the cast’s “inspired improv and physical comedy” are gut-bustingly funny enough to appeal to anyone.

Anyone, that is, with a high tolerance for vulgarity, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. Although this play originated in the esteemed National Theatre of Great Britain, this is by no means a highbrow, or even “Masterpiece Theatre–style middlebrow,” production. It’s “a lowbrow vaudeville turn in the manner of TV’s The Benny Hill Show,” complete with all the pratfalls, lewdness, and flying fish heads that implies. The convoluted story concerns a ne’er-do-well (James Corden) who is simultaneously employed by an upper-crust murderer (Oliver Chris) and a switchblade-wielding gangster (Jemima Rooper). The plot, however, is only a pretext for “frenzied slapstick and nudge-nudge-wink-wink dialogue” that quickly grow tiresome.

“Yes, food is flung, trousers are dropped, and bawdy innuendos are exchanged,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. But it’s hard not to admire the “taut tightrope between order and disorder” set up by director Nicholas Hytner. The performers prove “as rowdy as the Three Stooges and as light-footed as Fred Astaire.” Rooper is fierce and engaging as the thug—or rather, as the thug’s twin sister in drag. Chris meanwhile offers a “priceless vivisection” of aristocratic manhood. Yet the show undoubtedly belongs to Corden, whose artfully anarchic improv is “the most delicious I’ve ever seen on Broadway.” Two Guvnors feels like “ideal escapism for anxious times.”