Ten years ago Blake Morrison came up with a wonderfully funny version of Kleist’s comedy The Broken Jug — said to be the only German comedy of its time — which he relocated to the Yorkshire Dales and retitled The Cracked Pot. I remember Barry Rutter, in the role of the rascally judge who brings disasters upon himself, playing it with a progressively cracked and plastered pate.
Morrison has since translated two Greek tragedies for Rutter’s Northern Broadsides and now returns to the 18th century for this excellent version of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters — relocated to Yorkshire again, to Skipton in the 1850s, where Venice’s Grand Canal becomes the Liverpool- Leeds Canal and there is genial mockery of any Yorkshire town that has the misfortune not to be Skipton.
I don’t know why the stage is strewn with oriental rugs, but the symmetrical heaps of coal and limestone chunks on top of them make sense, since these were carried on the canal. Above them hangs a constellation of miner’s lamps like stars.
Morrison has delved into dictionaries of period slang for his characters’ colourful exchanges, adding some coarse puns of his own. He also has fun with elisions, as when a maid dusts t’house from t’attic t’ t’cellar, or when Rutter’s Dodge, the man of the title searching for one of his gaffers, exclaims: “He i’n’t in t’inn.”
The intricacies of the plot begin with the arrival from Bradford of Charlotte disguised as her recently dead twin Charles, who was accidentally killed by her lover outside a pie shop in Wigan. Since Charles was betrothed to a local sheep-farmer’s daughter, subsequently re-betrothed to the vicar’s son, she has to be re-re-betrothed back to Charles, who of course isn’t who she thinks he is. Add the lover fleeing from police, and Dodge, who sees a way of earning double wages and eating double meals by serving two masters, and the fruits of confusion are ready to burst.
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The famous scene where he brings a four-course meal to the two of them, in separate rooms but at the same time, usually done as a hectic race, is more ingeniously played here as a miracle of timing with swing doors. A likeable cast, led by Rutter’s dippy Dodge, nimbly captures the mixture of panic and bombast. Recommended.
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