Back from Lib Dem conference, Ed Davey watched this adaptation in his Kingston constituency of Jerome K Jerome’s novella about a trio of late Victorian gents rowing the Thames accompanied by fox terrier Montmorency. Might the up-for-fun politician suddenly drop on to the stage in a Scooby-Doo suit?
He didn’t, although Christopher Haydon’s perky production features one actor making an applause-winning entrance from an improbable location. This version is also certainly more liberal and democratic than the 1889 text whose language has often dated in meaning or propriety.
Bronté Barbé plays, with false moustache and lower voice notes, the eccentric Harris who, with lugubrious George (Richard David-Caine), joins pompous hypochondriac Jerome (Jonny Weldon) on a river trip that starts from Kingston. As with all quirky, discursive books, the challenge of adaptation is imposing momentum and tension. Al Smith’s dramatisation neatly juggles chronology (the sixth chapter is his first scene) and anchors the book’s best set pieces (swan attack, putrid cheese, a murder investigation) in a new narrative where the blokes are heading to Oxford for Harris’s wedding, his choice of best man a bugbear.
Three Men in a Boat has come to represent an idyllic, witty lost England. Tom Stoppard, an immigrant ecstatic to have landed here, wrote a 1975 BBC adaptation in that spirit. But the book has darker meditations on religion, society and death. Smith makes George, originally a bachelor banker, a doctor who has been recently widowed, with a boldly bleak monologue about bereavement that is presumably a tonal surrogate for an incident in the original, not dramatised, where the boaters spot a floating corpse.
Otherwise, the show foregrounds jauntiness. Montmorency, a menace to ankles, cats and other dogs in the book, is here a charming puppy rag puppet (animated by Calum Donald-Bruce), a theatrical device now so familiar that it prompts in-jokes: “We’ll have to eat the puppeteer!”
The 135-minute show is punctuated by eight musical numbers and, though it is now almost obligatory for classic literature to be sung and danced (the most recent victim Jane Eyre), this is a logical candidate. The book includes references to Gilbert and Sullivan, opera, music hall, banjos, bagpipes and accordions. Grant Olding’s songs incorporate all, including a biographical patter number about Jerome, an Italianate aria for the reeking cheese and a Tchaikovsky ballet pastiche (choreographed by Simon Hardwick) when the journey reaches swan river.
That sequence and others justify the poster for the show which, referencing Magritte and Dalí, suggests the story is surrealist. But slapstick dominates in an engaging evening that smooths the jagged oddness of the book.
• At Rose theatre, Kingston upon Thames, until 10 October
