Review: The Invisible Man - Menier Theatre, London

HG Wells’s classic tale is given a music hall makeover in this buoyantly comic stage adaptation which was first conceived almost 20 years ago by playwright Ken Hill.

Maria Friedman as the innkeeper Mrs Hall Maria Friedman as the innkeeper Mrs Hall.

A Vaudevillian MC introduces a “chilling dramatic presentation” as if it's an act performed in 1904 (seven years after Wells' novella was written) and we're served up a blend of slapstick and suspense with a few lashings of melodrama as we witness the 'ideous 'appenings in the village of Ipping.

It's all intentionally hammy. As soon as the mysterious stranger (you know who) arrives in a heavy overcoat and with his head swathed in bandages, we're given eerie music and sinister lighting.

We discover – after a series of madcap scenes - that the irascible visitor is actually a brilliant scientist whose life's work has been to achieve invisibility and who is now hell bent on world domination. Of course he is. But really we are far less interested in the plot than we are in the illusions. Call me a sucker for special effects, but stage magician Paul Kieve has masterminded some comic treats.

We witness doors and windows opening, papers flying, frying pans and guns hovering in the air and even a coup de theatre where our invisible villain (John Gordon Sinclair, though you'd hardly know it) rips off his bandages and sits, seemingly headless but still puffing a cigarette while swathed in a Noel Coward-style smoking jacket. And let's not forget the classic disappearing-from-a-sealed-box illusion performed by Gary Wilmot at the close. Yes, it's gimmicky but what's not to like?

Wilmot is the narrator of the piece and we also get to enjoy a cluster of other comedic yokels - the bent bobby, the gay vicar, the nice-but-dim squire who's actually concealing a bumper IQ and a Scottish Suffragette. You can imagine the student Stephen Fry relishing all this at the Cambridge Footlights. The cast, including Maria Friedman as the huffing and puffing innkeeper Mrs Hall (“get them spuds on!”) all overact with gusto.

It doesn't delve as deep as Wells' classic (which is also concerned with the limitations of invisibility, including the necessity of having to go naked not to give the game away) but Wells loved a light touch and this comic romp's music hall setting, with its preoccupation with mystery and phenomena, seems right up his invisible street.  

Box office: 0207 907 7060, until February 13, 2011

Verdict: 4/5

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