Photo Alan McCredieAward-winning Scottish playwright DC Jackson relocates Pierre Beaumarchais’s famous tale into the ruthless world of contemporary finance. Here, the real deals are done in bars and sexual politics rule the boardroom. Read more …
Set against a backdrop of expenses scandals and big bonus payouts, Jackson brings his unique style of wit and humour to the touchy subject of big business.
With previous work including My Romantic History (Scotsman Fringe First Award 2010), and the trilogy of The Wall, The Ducky and The Chooky Brae, this is Jackson’s first commission for the Lyceum.
Thatcher's children are alive and kicking in Mark Thomson's production, which, while peppered with a series of trademark spiky one-liners by Jackson, also shows a new-found maturity from a writer who seems to have moved on from adolescent fumbling. If the tub-thumping anti-capitalist polemic at the end states the obvious, it feels very much of the moment.
Though Mark Thomson’s adaptation of Beaumarchais’s 1778 text wanders on the obvious side a little too much, it’s largely a carefully considered and admirably traditional reimagining.
This is a fine, powerful production that makes its audience laugh and think in equal measure.
Figaro is content to be a fun financial farce – and it works.
Barring the odd lull in the first half, Mark Thomson's production is a delight, not least in the splendid comic turns of Nicola Roy, Stuart Bowman and Molly Innes.
The humour is fast and fun, the cast wrapping their tongues around wordy one-liners and making some complicated physical farce look easy.
Crisp, witty and biting with its language.
An enjoyable brew of satire, farce and sex comedy, The Marriage of Figaro is a comic highlight of the Lyceum’s 11/12 season: gleefully picking up the respectable boulder of the corporate world and taking mischievous delight in exposing the wriggling, lust-driven creatures scuttling underneath.
Greatly entertains, but also sometimes disappoints.
While a theatrical battle of the sexes has been done before, Jackson’s script is almost poetic in its depiction of women as the stronger sex, and men as the weaker in matters of the heart, and the loins.
Jackson's script is often too limp and predictable for the production to build up any momentum.
Energetic performances, amusing dialogue and absurdist gags don't bring this adaptation to independent life or compensate for its lack of contemporary kick.
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Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh from Friday March 23, 2012, until Saturday April 14, 2012. More info: www.lyceum.org.uk
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