Ring Round the Moon is light, diverting, amusing with dextrous dialogue that can raise a titter - deep, it is not. It is set in a country house on the eve of a party when plots are laid to scupper the chances of an imprudent marriage. There are identical brothers, love-crossed women, disguises, outlandish plans, a faithful butler and an imperious and redoubtable aunt. So far so PG Wodehouse. JJ Field making his West End debut is a pleasing enough presence in a sub-Jude Law kind of way, there are some nicely choreographed dances, some acidly cynical manoeuvrings and an innocent thrown into the mix, played prettily by Fiona Button. But there is one colossal mistake that collapses the whole lemon soufflé. One crass oversight of such import that it should have had alarm bells ringing the length of Shaftesbury Avenue - or at least halfway up Northumberland Avenue, where the play is being staged. I will explain:
       Jean Anouilh set his play in the belle époque of turn of the century France. He wrote it in 1946 and Christopher Fry translated it in 1950, a diversion from the privations of post war austerity and perhaps a light tonic for the nervous collapse that Fry suffered whilst serving during the war. Enter the director of this revival, Sean Mathias who moves the setting of the play to Post War France with the reasoning that Christian Dior launched his New Look in 1947 so it must be a time for glamorous parties. The costumes look great, the set is fine and Matthias may have pulled it all off were it not for the legacy of two Jewish characters in Arnoiulh's original script. Arnoiulh bequeaths us a money obsessed Jewish millionaire with a dangerously marriageable daughter staying at a French country house; it is the proposed marriage to the Jewish heiress that drives the action of the comedy. But how many Jewish millionaires would there be left loitering around French chateaux in 1947? How many would be persuaded to see the error of their money grubbing ways, then moved to tearfully tear up wads of notes and declare they missed being the "poor little tailor from Krakow"? How many tailors were their left in Krakow in 1947? There are many Jewish stereotypes in literature, some offensive some less so, that are confidently played to modern audiences. The Merchant of Venice has been successfully staged in Israel. But these works with their legacies of different attitudes have to be handled with care. To set lines like "I always carry plenty of notes", "money is the answer to everything", "strike a bargain with me before it is too late" at a time when the greater part of European Jewry had been wiped out or fled the continent, is grotesquely impolite. To play it for laughs with an 'Oy-vey' accent is puzzlingly misguided. Apart from that, the cast carried the script off well and the dancing was slick, but for me the laughs rang rather hollow after the first act.
Charlie Taylor