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See How They Run Tickets

Duchess TheatreLondon

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"It is a delight to welcome Philip King's wartime classic back into the West End... and, watching Douglas Hodge's superb revival, I was struck by the play's quintessential Englishness... Hodge realises that farce, is chiefly about performance; and accordingly he has engaged a crack team... It may be an evening tinged with nostalgia. But it proves that farce is the essence of theatre in that it requires physical agility, spot-on timing and is capable of transforming a preposterous situation into spiralling ecstasy..." - The Guardian

"One of the great surprises of Douglas Hodge's giddily entertaining revival is that a harmless bit of froth whipped up during the dark days of the Second World War, and premiered in January 1945 - just as the Germans really were on the run - should still have legs. No forgiving patience is required. Ransacking all the cliches and conventions of the genre - mistaken identity and infidelity, manifest contrivance - See How They Run is at once old-fashioned and timeless, sending up its own creakiness with a youthfully supple irreverence... Bliss, pure bliss." - Daily Telegraph

"A revival of a 1940s drawing-room farce, done faithfully with a vicar in underpants, a tweedy lady hidden in a broom cupboard, a bishop in his pyjamas - and no fewer than five men in dog collars. Now that's brave!... Written by Philip King, it is a classic 20th-century English farce... by the end I was cackling as merrily as the rest of the mainly elderly audience." - Daily Mail

"Lovers of outrageously contrived wartime farces will love this outrageously contrived wartime farce... Although Douglas Hodge directs with an actor's precise feel for comic timing and the physical mechanics of farce, and despite the efforts of a fine cast, my suspended disbelief kept twanging back up into my face... Ah well. Flawed, funny, and always bulldog-spirited." - Evening Standard

Set in the idyllic village of Merton-cum-Middlewick, where the village inhabitants are preparing themselves for the imminent threat of Nazi invasion. Resident nosy-parker and spinster, Miss Skillon, becomes convinced that her beloved vicar’s actress wife is having an affair and attempts to expose her. Add an escaped German prisoner of war, a handsome actor, the visiting Bishop of Lax, a rotund locum priest and some meddling neighbours and you have all the ingredients for a classic British farce.