Iconic comedy duo comes to Salisbury Playhouse
Jeeves & Wooster opens tonight (1st September) for a three week run
An iconic comedy pairing has their first show at Salisbury Playhouse tonight (Friday 1st September).
P.G Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, from the Code of the Wooster’s, telling the tale of Bertie Wooster’s chaotic weekend at Totleigh Towers.
The play is in the city until 23rd September.
We were able to speak to Luke Barton and Alistair Cope who star in the show ahead of the opening night.
Alistair plays Seppings, as well as several other characters, including a cow. He says the show is really fun:
“It’s two hours of just laughing, it’s all silly, it’s all bonkers, it’s multiple characters, wigs and fake moustaches,” he said.
Alistair added: “It’s high farce at its best in a brilliantly written, clever story, that means you can just sit there and enjoy it.”
Luke Barton portrays Bertie Wooster and told us he was drawn to the show by the comedy in the show.
“I think the writing of Wodehouse is famously side-splitting and so excellently written.”
Luke describes his character as the ‘central clown’ in Wodehouse’s stories: “He’s the person who everything unfortunate you can imagine happens to and he has to get himself out of these scrapes, and so I thought ‘that sounds like it could be a real load of fun!’”
A privilege to make people laugh
Theatre serves lots of purposes, Luke told us, saying it’s important to be able to give people an chance to remove themselves from daily life and give them a good time.
“We’re living through pretty hard times at the moment and I think escaping from that and having a good time are really important,” Luke said.
“This is a piece that is definitely going to take the audience, for a couple of hours, completely away from whatever’s going and just throw them into Bertie’s chaotic life in 1920’s London.”
Alistair echoed those sentiments, saying it’s a ‘buzz’ for the actors to know they’ve just made somebodies day.
“There’s nothing better than knowing you’ve just made people belly laugh for two hours, it’s an absolute privilege to be able to make people laugh like that.”
Alistair added that the current situation of the world leaves him seeking something that will make him laugh or is completely silly, rather than something that leaves him in tears or exhausted at the end of it.
“A lot of the time I just want to watch something I’m going to enjoy, I think this is the theatre version of that, just come sit back and laugh for two hours and you’ll feel brilliant afterwards.”