Kelvin Fletcher and Laurie Davidson in Jack Absolute Flies Again at the National Theatre
(Picture: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg)So, comic lightning does strike twice. By roughly transposing Sheridan’s The Rivals to an RAF squadron stationed at a Sussex country house during the Battle of Britain, Richard Bean and Oliver Chris create something every bit as uproarious and ribald as Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, which took comparable liberties with a Goldoni classic.
There’s the same ungoverned humour, giddy abandon and metatheatrical playfulness: the same sense of primal urges pulsing underneath. But Jack Absolute is also completely its own thing, taking jokey aim at British class-consciousness and exceptionalism, as well as sexism, xenophobia and “warstalgia”.
