We've been to an encore cinema broadcast of the brilliant National Theatre production of One Man Two Guvnors, first seen as part of NT Live in September 2011.
It is eight years since One Man Two Guvnors opened at the National Theatre in London, quickly becoming one of the company’s biggest hits during the tenure of the then artistic director Nicholas Hytner. The production later had two UK tours, a three-year West End run and a stint on Broadway, earning multiple awards including a Tony Award for the play’s star James Corden.
The production has surfaced again because NT Live has been running an encore broadcast of the play as part of a retrospective marking ten years of cinema relays of theatrical productions.
Adapted from Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth century farce A Servant of Two Masters, this version by Richard Bean relocates the action from the Venice of the 1750s to Brighton in 1963. The lead character, Truffledino is transformed into Francis Henshall, the easily confused young man who accidentally gets employed by two people simultaneously and then weaves a complex web of deceit in trying to keep his employers from meeting each other. Since the two are actually lovers, this really is a lost cause.
We saw the original on stage during its West End run and loved it. The ensemble work of the cast was brilliant, and James Corden’s performance was superb, alternating pathos with slapstick, audience interaction and superb timing. Last week’s cinema relay was an encore from the original broadcast of September 2011, and was a great reminder of just how good the show was. Certainly the near-capacity audience at Settle’s Victoria Hall clearly had a great time.
NT Live has been a huge success over the last ten years, bringing live theatre to a large and wide audience in excess of nine million people – currently some 2,500 venues in more than 65 different territories around the world. Last week’s relay was a reminder of another big advantage of the idea – the fact that truly memorable productions such as this one can live on and be seen by future generations in ‘as live’ situations on big screens.