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There’s no messing about on the river in this revival of a 1908 play by Jerome K Jerome, author of the popular Victorian lads’ jolly ‘Three Men in a Boat’. A hit when it was first performed, ‘The Passing of the Third Floor Back’ now comes off as a sort of benign ‘An Inspector Calls’.
In a London boarding house, under the eye of a penny-pinching landlady, Mrs Sharpe, a rag-tag bunch of chancers, gamblers and social climbers steal candles, bitch about each other and generally aren’t terribly nice. That is until a mysterious stranger comes to stay.
Nearly a century on this play is, at times, as creaky as an old boarding house. The stranger (an eerie Alexander Knox), who seems to know each lodger, spookily mansplains to each one how they’re better than they think. These rigidly episodic encounters see early wry wit replaced by creeping earnestness.
The play’s religious allusions aren’t exactly subtle (there are 12 guests, folks) and everyone’s a lot more fun when they’re unreformed. As Miss Kite, in pigtails and Aunt Sally make-up (because, here, you may as well be dead if you’re 40), Paddy Navin gleefully channels Bette Davis in ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’.
But this production gives Jerome a good boost. Director Jonny Kelly imbues everything with a dreamy atmosphere, underscored by the fluttering lull of on-stage harpist Lizzie Faber. The overall result lends the play’s appeal to kindness an effectively hypnotic rhythm.