Travels with my Aunt London Full Circle Productions Ritz Carlton, April 27 With cheerful whistling of funeral music, the four actors from London Full Circle Productions launched energetically into their physical theatre rendition of Grahame Greene's comedy classic.
This company - which in its previous incarnation as London Globe Theatre Company has performed regularly at the Fringe Festival - is a welcome addition to Hong Kong's dinner theatre scene.
In Giles Havergal's adaptation of the novel, all four actors were Henry Pulling and Henry was all of us: stuck in regular jobs, thinking of cash in the bank and window boxes and longing for an Aunt Augusta to take us away to where bank vaults are to steal from, and the flowers grow wild.
Roger Lloyd Pack was just right as Aunt Augusta: beautifully postured and shocking in a let's-take-tea-with-our-marijuana-dear kind of way. And Edmund Pegge was a persuasive CIA man in disguise.
However Wordsworth, Aunt Augusta' black servant and lover was portrayed as more of a caricature than I felt comfortable with, and his supposedly Sierra Leone accent as pronounced by Nigel Miles-Thomas toured with the wanderlust of an Aunt Augusta randomly from the Caribbean to Wales.
Donald Sumpter's direction was deft and imaginative. It seemed however more designed for an intimate theatre rather than a wide ballroom where some of the energy of the performance was absorbed by the chocolate pudding and the tension of the drama dispersed at times. I noticed a few people drifting off, although they woke up again at the funny bits.