Pools Paradise - Review (From St Albans & Harpenden Review)

Pools Paradise - Review

9:09am Tuesday 7th July 2009 in

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REMEMBER when the pools man came round the door for your weekly money. Remember checking the football results to see if your forecast was right and the teams had fallen in line with your thinking and had won, lost or drawn.

Remember – decades before the National Lottery – what it would be like to win millions on the pools.

Pools Paradise, currently playing at the Theatre Royal Windsor, takes you back to those heady days of the ‘60s when we all seemed to play the pools.

This wonderful farce by Philip King tells us how the church at Merton-cum-Middlewick is in a bad state of repair and needs fixing.

It is all set up for the incumbent vicar, The Reverend Lionel Toop (David Callister) and his wife Penelope (Kathryn Dimery) to haggle over a pools coupon lost by the Reverend Arthur Humphrey (David Jansen) under the carpet at the vicarage.

What follows is the two and fro of classic comedy as both this pair of religious pools zealots fight it out to find the ‘golden ticket’.

Add in the housekeeper, Miss Skillen (Helen Jeckells), Ida (Julia Main), friend Willie Bigs (Frankie Fitzgerald) and the visiting Bishop of Lax (Ben Roberts) and you have the making of total chaos in the British farcical fashion.

This play, first presented at the Phoenix Theatre in 1961 is a timeless classic.

It could easily be about fighting over a Lottery ticket.

Trousers are down and off as vicars run around in a seaside style romp.

It really is end of the pier humour with naughty postcards written all over it.

Delightful, charming, British humour at its best. Great for summer, the ‘Royal was packed and full of genuine laughter.

This play is a triumph with brilliant acting all round. What fun it must be to act in a farce like this.

The entire cast is wonderful but Kathryn Dimery is a sensationally scatty wife with some great one liners who steals the show.

This year at the ‘Royal has, and looks like continuing to be one of its best. You had to have a farce in there somewhere and this one fits the bill.

A pleasure paradise of a play. Dimery is dazzling.

Paul Thomas