The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! at Jermyn Street Theatre

With a worrying number of versions of A Christmas Carol on at theatres across London it was nice to find some different seasonal fare to savour.

I like Jermyn Street Theatre for various reasons and that was a strong pull in this case. I was also familiar with the tale of Madame Bovary, having listened to an audio drama of it a couple of times I knew that while it is a tragedy there was a lot of good humour along the way.

Some things change and some things change. It used to be a moderate walk from my office in Kings Cross to Jermyn Street and it is now a pleasant longer walk of just under 20km. The restaurant above the theatre used to be a nice Italian and now it is an interesting African called Papa L’s Kitchen. The walk and the food were an excellent start to the evening.

The play opened towards the end of the story with Madame Bovary in the pharmacist getting arsenic to kill herself only to find that a couple of rat catchers had just bought it all. We were told that this was a framing device to enable the tragedy to be turned into a comedy.

We then went to the true beginning with the first encounter between Emma Rouault and local doctor Charles Bovary, and the story took a familiar route from there.

A familiar route but one twisted into great humour, the seeds of which were already in the text. Milking the humour for all it was worth was a fabulous cast of just four playing all the roles with melodrama, panache and a flamboyant array of props and costumes.

It was a lot of fun every step of the way.

Then there was the ending. I will not spoil it but the tragedy/farce dilemma was resolved in an unexpected and very satisfactory way.

The long walk and the fine meal set the evening up well and The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! exceeded that build up, it was the ice cream with glacé fruit piled lovingly on top of the cake.