Why, as a matter of curiosity, does no one ever revive the Roman comedies of Plautus? They have provided a source for Shakespeare, Rodgers and Hart, Talbot Rothwell and, in this instance, Stephen Sondheim. Since they are small gems, why are they only ever allowed to shine through a reflected glory?
The odd thing about this particular piece of musicalised Plautus is that, in theory, it shouldn't work. As Stephen Banfield pithily says in his book on Sondheim: "Farce is breathless: singing is the opposite." Yet, as Ian Talbot's Regent's Park production proves, the show has a timeless appeal: it's the one Sondheim almost everybody likes.
Partly, I suspect, it's because Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart created a classic book. They raided Plautus's comedies and skilfully plaited together sundry different strands: the wily slave helping his young master marry a courtesan, the braggart soldier returning from the wars to claim his bride, the senile ditherer reunited with his lost family. They added the notion of the slave-hero, Pseudolus, hungering for his freedom. But the show is an anthology of stock situations dating back to around 200BC.
It also taps into our nostalgia for a more recent past. The jokes themselves belong to American burlesque tradition in which the classic world was riotously sent up: most famously here in the line where an outraged courtesan says to an angry eunuch: "Don't you dare lower your voice to me!" But the show also plugs into our delight in the old-fashioned book-musical where the songs offered a respite from the action rather than an extension of it.
This, in fact, is the first show for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics and what he does is to smash all the pieties about the perfectly integrated score. The particular joy of Forum is that it reaches back beyond the deadly virtues of the Oklahoma era, to the days when musical comedy was pure fun.
Over the years it's been a magnet for star-comics such as Zero Mostel and Frankie Howerd and now it's the turn of Roy Hudd. Clad in a patterned smock and socks that make him look like a roving chequer-board, Hudd brings with him the gamey whiff of old music-halls. He joshes the conductor ("Get on with it gal") and the front-stalls like Archie Rice, his voice has a lecherous throatiness and his eyebrows semaphore simmering lust. He's a deeply loveable performer who has exactly the right gift of being both in character and standing outside the action like a farcical Thersites.
Where Frankie Howerd was a camp Pseudolus in a straight world, Ian Talbot reverses the joke by treating Hudd as the one unabashedly hetero figure in a world of escalating camp. Peter Gallagher's Miles Gloriosus is a preening Roman Elvis.
At times the camp note is over-struck but one can forgive it all for the sake of a neat running-gag in which, every time a brothel-door is opened, we hear the high-pitched whinny of the resident castrati.
Politically correct? Absolutely not. Theatrically enjoyable? Absolutely yes. It's a show that in overlaying Plautine farce with American burlesque has strong claims, as this production confirms, to be the funniest musical ever written.
• ***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
