The perfect recipe for laughter back in Colombo
Chaos and confusion: The two wives
Run For Your Wife is back on the Colombo stage under the aegis of Cold Theatre 7 and director Kevin Cruze. Having been earlier done by Mohamed Adamaly (twice) and Indu Dharmasena to great acclaim, the familiar play promises an evening of laughter and fun.
Written by Ray Cooney, the plot centres around London’s ‘cabby’ John Smith (played by the comically charismatic Tharusha Kumarasinghe) who has been maintaining two wives on the sly. When John gets mugged and consequently hospitalised, the addresses of both his cosy flats in Wimbledon and Streatham surface and police in both towns start following up. A hilarious web of counter-lies and confusion ensues.
Run for Your Wife happens to be Cooney’s most popular play, bearing the record of the longest-running comedy in the West End.
For Director Kevin Cruze whose variegated record includes musicals such as Peter Pan and Grease, and the Christie classics The Mousetrap, And Then There Were None, and Witness for the Prosecution – this year happens to be his ‘silver jubilee’ on stage. He picked a comedy this time – a peculiar creature he has dealt with only once before with Cold Theatre 7, as he says “the cues are quick and you need comic timing,” but the “actors made it all easy.”
The cast is a mix of new blood (there’s Rachel Hamer who plays John’s ‘young wife’ Barbara) and well known names such as Rehan Amaratunga, Nandun Dissanayake and Wasaam Ismail (playing Sergeant Troughton, the very queeny dressmaker Bobby Franklin and Stanley Gardner, John’s neighbour, respectively). The rest of the cast are Amarsha Tissera who plays John’s nagging first wife Mary and Madura Wijeratne who plays the portly Sergeant Porterhouse.
With the perfect recipe of a script for unfailing laughter and a great cast, Kevin says confidently “You can come, have fun and go home.”
Run for Your Wife will be on at the Lionel Wendt theatre from August 21-24. Tickets are available at the Lionel Wendt box office.
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