IN the opening programme note, the Royal Court only half jokes that a lot of their shows germinate from the seed of a scouse pun, The Netherley Hillbillies being no exception. Sadly, author Barbara Philips’ first play written for The Court fails to deliver the riches of comedy offered by its title.
It’s an idea full of comic potential. A working class family from a council estate in Netherley win the lottery and move to a swanky, security gated new-build in Formby. The opportunities for building a sequence of hilarious scenarios seem endless, but Philips seems to have grabbed hold of one idea which is then flogged relentlessly for two hours.
The newly minted Kennedy family, deciding that they need to relocate to avoid the begging letters, make a hasty retreat to Formby (or more likely Freshfield, which Terry Wogan used to call ‘The swimming pool end of Formby’). Moving under cover of darkness, a mistake over which of the anonymous looking houses is theirs leads to a less than glorious introduction to their new neighbours. To be fair, the opening has a lot of promise. The Kennedys pretend to have inherited a fortune from a rich relative, while we quickly learn that the snobby neighbours are next to bankrupt and looking for a way to marry into money.
Jed Kennedy has made the decision to move out of a sense of necessity, and clearly doesn’t like the idea of Formby even before he gets there. He confines his family to barracks and his wife Lisa, mother-in-law Renie and daughter Elly-May quickly tire of being owners of a fortune they aren’t allowed to enjoy. Meanwhile, next door, long suffering father Ernest is helpless as his scheming wife Marigold plots to marry off their seemingly eligible son Gavin to Elly-May.
A strong and very accomplished cast throw everything they have into their parts. Paul Duckworth and Lyn Francis are Royal Court favourites, and they put huge effort into creating Jed Kennedy and Renie, and it is they who succeed in drawing some much needed guffaws from the audience. Reiss Barber and Jasmine Herrington are a breath of fresh air as Gavin and Elly-May, and in these two characters we can imagine any number of potential plot-saving twists and alternate endings, but all of these are thrown away in favour of a damp squib of a denouement that feels like a white flag of surrender.
Ultimately the show relies on stereotypes of the worst and most socially divisive kind. The two families sit at either end of a spectrum, with the incumbent Formby family (themselves presumably earlier monied incomers) being so stuck up you could never get them down, while the Kennedys’ inverted snobbery is the polar opposite. Vicky Entwistle’s Marigold affects one extreme of vocal abomination, while Francis’ Renie snarls out the other. It is a show in which we are desperately trying to find someone on whom to pin our hopes of redemption in the story, but the more it progresses, the more we realise that there isn’t a single one of them who we would want for a neighbour.
Director Deborah Yip has clearly used everything but dynamite to mine the text for laughs, but the resulting caricatures that every character is reduced to rob the show of any empathy, and the end result feels lacking in any sort of heart or warmth.
Alfie Heywood’s designs make good use of the Royal Court stage revolve to carry us swiftly from scene to scene, and there is something Ayckbourne like in the over-the-garden-fence juxtapositions between the rival families’ domains. Not only does the show look good, but production values are high throughout. With a little reworking to include a funnier plot twist and to give it one or two characters we really want to root for, this could be a hit.
Star Rating 2½ stars
Review by Nigel Smith
