Theatre review: Barefoot in the Park, Pitlochry Festival Theatre

According to the poet Philip Larkin, it was the year when sexual intercourse began; and 1963 was also the year of the Broadway premiere of Neil Simon’s gorgeous light-touch comedy Barefoot In The Park, immortalised four years later in the film starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. So as the long half-century of liberalisation and globalisation that began back then shudders to a close, in the present crisis, it’s perhaps not surprising that Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Lyceum should choose to look back fondly, and with a little sadness, at a time so different from our own – although certainly not without its own terrifying Cold War shadows and tensions.

Olivier Huband and Claire Grogan in Barefoot In The Park at Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Barefoot in the Park, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ***



So here we are, in the small New York loft apartment of newlyweds Corie and Paul, back in the days when Greenwich Village lofts were a cheap option; and as she and Paul begin married life, the ecstatic Corie tries to spread a little more happiness by match-making between her widowed mother, Ethel, and her eccentric new neighbour, one Victor Velasco.  After Victor organises a wild night out at an Albanian restaurant, though, Corie and Paul experience their first major row, over Paul’s instinctive caution and conservatism, and Corie’s free-spirited sense of adventure; and so the familiar political conflict between 1950’s stuffiness and 1960’s social revolution comes slamming into their tiny living-room, almost breaking their marriage before it starts.


It’s all these unspoken resonances, of course – alongside its brilliant, quick-fire New York dialogue – that given Simon’s delicious romantic comedy its enduring strength; and it’s perhaps because Elizabeth Newman’s Pitlochry production doesn’t quite do enough to evoke that vital social and political context that it seems slightly lacking in comic pace and edge, and often emerges as more poignant than funny.
Yet it still offers a delightful evening’s entertainment, not least because of Adrian Rees’s glorious skylit set, and the powerful Sixties tunes, including The Locomotion and Say A Little Prayer For Me, contributed  by Marc Small and Karis Jack, as the delivery man and woman. Jessica Hardwick is a pitch-perfect Corie, Olivier Huband a believable Paul, Clare Grogan a charming if slightly lost-looking Ethel, and Hamish Clark a petite Victor, with an arresting Scottish-Bulgarian accent. 


And if the four of them never quite weld into the inspired ensemble that Simon at his best demands, then that’s perhaps not surprising; at a moment when to raise the spirit of light comedy demands some heavy lifting, and the effort is not always easy to disguise.