La Cage aux Folles [The Play], Park Theatre review - half-cock farce

Not the musical then, worst luck. How timely it would have been to mark Jerry Herman's passing with a celebration of a great achievement. Just how brilliantly the pathos and panache of his score lift Jean Poiret's long-running 1970s farce about a gay couple and their St Tropez drag club having to "straighten up" for family values is only emphasised by this ultimately threadbare adaptation by Simon Callow. Was the French-Italian film as good as those of us who saw it in the early 1980s remember? Having been surprised by the hilarity of another humanising attempt, The Birdcage, with a laugh-until-you-cry performance from Nathan Lane, I watched the original again and found it really wasn't.

Park Artistic Director Jez Bond's approach isn't a bad one to begin with. With designer Tim Shortall's very gay sea-view apartment setting the scene, Georges (Michael Matus), Albin (Paul Hunter) and their "maid" Jacob (Syrus Lowe) project impressively in the small space as they consciously deliver to the audience; all they say and do is theatre, which at least means it's not stereotypical Seventies camp. The funniest scene belongs to Mark Cameron's butcher Zorba (pictured below with Lowe), developing a declaration of love for Brueghel the Elder's depiction of meat into a tearful paean to fine art: that's comic timing for you, and his exit won a well-deserved round of applause. Hunter's mug is made for comedy, and Lowe gets to show off a range of RuPaulish runway looks; Matus declaims with appropriate histrionics. Then, with the arrival of Matus's son Laurent (Arthur Hughes) the uneasiness sets in: can dad give the gay pad a sober makeover and play butch to impress girlfriend's far-right parents? Callow, in a programme interview which oddly fails to acknowledge the original film, knows this is un-PC stuff from a different age when things were really like that. But since dad gives way, the farce depends upon it. You can hear the what-the-hell silences as he betrays who and what he is in front of the potential in-laws. The nasty taste needs to be taken away in cut-glass precision for the dinner party from hell (this is where I cried with laughter at Lane's turn in The Birdcage). But the supporting actors who people the stage in the second act just aren't sharp enough; the projection becomes shoutiness and the whole thing gets bogged down in a mire from which it doesn't extract itself.

It's all the more disappointing after the Park's brilliant handling of what is essentially another gay two-hander, Martin Sherman's Gently Down the Stream. That would have merited a West End transfer; La Cage aux Folles [The Play] doesn't. It took two gay men (Herman and Lane) to humanise a dodgy premise and actually celebrate what's at the core here, a loving 15-year old gay marriage; a third (Callow) simply puts the Folles back in their Cage.

• At the Park Theatre until 21 March
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