Mr Pooter declares himself disgusted by “amateur theatricals” in The Diary of a Nobody but its co-authors, George and Weedon Grossmith, had considerable stage success. Weedon acted, wrote plays and managed a theatre; George appeared with D’Oyly Carte and penned hundreds of sketches and songs. It was an inspired idea by director Ned Sherrin to make a musical revue out of Keith Waterhouse’s play Mr and Mrs Nobody, which combines the Grossmiths’ book with Waterhouse’s pastiche diary by Carrie, wife of the pernickety, pun-loving clerk.
The play has been revived for Jermyn Street theatre’s adventurous Footprints festival. The Grossmiths might be amused to find Pooter, whose shirts constantly need repairing and whose trousers come up short, treading the boards in this street of tailors. I’m afraid the natty Edward Baker-Duly should look rather more frayed in the role.
In providing the perspective of Carrie (Miranda Foster), Waterhouse neatly punctures Pooter’s pretensions while providing a few of her own. The humour is often in how Pooter misreads or overlooks Carrie, such as when her finely detailed diary entry about a carefully prepared dinner is followed by him jotting: “Carrie made a nice meat-tea.”
Anyone who only knows Pooter’s diary will be astounded by the severity of Carrie’s true feelings about their new home of the Laurels, Brickfield Terrace. The play juxtaposes the pair’s thoughts – their contradictory entries sometimes read simultaneously – but much of that tension was already implicit in the Grossmiths’ book. The arrival of the couple’s louche son Lupin (the multi-rolling Baker-Duly) doesn’t provide the same gear change as in the book and the second half of Waterhouse’s play begins to drag.
But director Gabriella Bird adds clever opening touches of Carrie sneakily reading her husband’s diary and the pair fussing over the arrangement of their parlour (smartly designed by Louie Whitemore). Arguments are accompanied by a train’s roar at the end of the garden and there’s a delightful way to depict Pooter’s bathing mishap with his beloved red enamel paint.
Sherrin’s 1986 production had a cast of four plus a pair of musicians; this two-hander gives each actor a turn at the piano and a song, with intermittent recorded music. It doesn’t truly bring alive the theatrical world in Pooter’s diary, from Lupin’s love of music hall to the couple’s games of consequences and the climactic seance. Pooter’s habitual air of deflation is captured by the wistful emptiness on stage when the couple relive their evenings entertaining Cummings and Gowing and their night at the Lord Mayor’s reception. Baker-Duly has a bottom note of jollity rather than the blood-vessel-bursting pettiness of the Grossmiths’ Pooter. His warm affection is matched by Foster, whose Carrie can also be as withering as Pooter is self-pleased: his explosive laughter at his jokes is met with her strained smiles.
There is probably a funnier fringe hour inside Waterhouse’s play but the show will chime with anyone whose lockdown left them bickering and battling through a list of home improvements, with or without a pot of red enamel paint.
At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 31 July and available online.
