REVIEW: RUN AT IT LAUGHING by Mark Ravenhill at Wilton’s Music Hall 9-10 May



Mark Ravenhill, one of the most distinguished of contemporary British playwrights, found some scenarios written in 1611 for plays performed in Italy, and used them to create ten new 90-minute comedies under the umbrella title ‘Run At It Laughing’. These were performed script-in-hand as rehearsed readings directed by Ravenhill himself at Wiltons Music Hall, on 9 and 10 May.

To judge from the one I saw, the result was a series of laugh-out-loud funny and cringingly rude Jacobean romps. The humour is obtained, as often as not, from double entendres that would have made Kenneth Williams blush, and the failure of elderly male characters to recognise that what is under discussion is sex.

The one I saw was called ‘Run At It Babies’. Two young women enjoy energetic affairs at a summer house party, as a result of which both of them swell alarmingly over the next nine months, and their worried fathers seek medical advice. Both the young women would like to marry the young men who helped them enjoy the summer, and the young men want to marry them. Unfortunately, this being fifteenth century Rome, to own up to having impregnated a young women outside matrimony will give her father the right to have you imprisoned and take all your goods and fortune.

What can the young people do to secure their future happiness? I am not spoiling it for you, should you ever get the chance to see it, if I tell you that the answer involves people pretending to be spirits, and that there is a happy ending. Along the way, you will be asked to believe that doctors of the time, having asked for a urine sample to check if a woman is pregnant, could be fobbed off with cat’s piss, and were likely to prescribe medicine that would make whoever took it bark and yearn for her cosy kennel.

The 11-strong cast sit in a row in the stage, scripts in hand, but they are clearly rehearsed, and all of them are ready with the right intonations and bits of business. All were good; standouts for me were Kathryn Pridgeon, Duncan Hess and Sasha Brooks.

The actors all worked without a fee, and profits are going to the Nia Project, which runs services for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse.

Photos by Bec Austin