The Librarians: A Very Serious Comedy! ⭐⭐⭐
“The staff at Plumstanton Library are clinging to tradition as the shelves collapse around them. The roof leaks, the stacks are bare, and they haven’t issued a new library card in years. When a new head librarian arrives and they learn the building could be condemned and sold, panic spreads fast! Can they save the library and themselves before it’s too late?”
Amy Milburn's direction is clear and strong, providing a solid framework for the story and letting the comic situations build without becoming confusing. There is a good understanding of the physical space and, as the chaos escalates, the staging makes sure we can follow exactly what is happening. That clarity is particularly important in a farce. When multiple characters are moving around, entrances and exits happen at speed, and increasingly ridiculous situations unfold, it would be very easy for the production to become messy. It doesn’t. Instead, a strong sense of control runs beneath the chaos, allowing the comedy to land.
The set is lovely and deceptively simple. It doesn’t need to recreate an enormous library in detail because the individual elements of the design are all doing double duty. Almost everything on stage has some connection to the comedy, whether that is a piece of furniture, a shelf, a door or another increasingly unreliable part of the library. It becomes a playground for the performers. And I genuinely appreciated how the set isn’t simply there to make the space look like a library. It actively improves the comedy and becomes part of the action.
Costume is brilliant at establishing personality before the characters have even had a chance to speak. Each character has a very clear visual identity, and those choices immediately tell us something about who they are. In a comedy where the characters are deliberately heightened, that is incredibly useful. You can almost work out who is going to cause the problem before they have opened their mouth.
Lighting is good and supports the action nicely. It doesn’t attempt to dominate the production, but it helps establish the different moments and keeps the stage visually interesting as the story develops. Sound works similarly, though it is used predominantly around scene changes. It helps move us between sections of the story without unnecessarily interrupting the action.
The book by Matthew Howell and Jack Michael Stacey is where things get interesting. There are moments of genuine hilarity here, particularly when the Inspector arrives, and the carefully fabricated world of Plumstanton Library begins to fall into disorder. That is where the show really comes alive. The physical comedy becomes stronger, the characters become more heightened, and the various elements begin crashing into one another in exactly the way a good farce should. My problem is that it takes a while to get there. The first ten to twenty minutes feel rather slow. There are jokes, but many of them generate smaller laughs rather than the bigger comic moments the production is clearly capable of. The audience is waiting for the situation to explode properly, and by the time it does, there isn’t quite enough time left to enjoy the entire potential of that upheaval. I also wanted more of the physical humour. The company clearly can create the increasingly ridiculous physical situations that make farce so much fun, and I would have happily seen the production lean into that even further.
The performances by Matthew Howell, Jack Michael Stacey, Caitlin Richards and Jack Lord are good and nicely rounded. The ensemble chemistry is strong, and everyone understands the heightened comic world the production has created. Matthew Howell and Jack Michael Stacey have a particularly strong understanding of the comic rhythm. At the same time, Caitlin Richards brings a lovely sense of character to the ensemble. Jack Lord similarly commits to the farcical world, helping the production keep its momentum as the disasters pile up.
My main reservation is Work Experience, who felt noticeably more two-dimensional than some of the other characters. There is certainly potential for the role to become one of the bigger comic players in the ensemble, but I wanted more layers and a clearer sense of who this person is beyond the joke. That said, the cast works extremely well together, and farce lives or dies by ensemble chemistry. Thankfully, this one has it.
The Librarians: A Very Serious Comedy! is a perfectly enjoyable workplace farce with a very British sense of humour. It has a lovely central idea, a strong ensemble and some genuinely funny physical comedy once the production gets into its stride. The biggest issue is simply getting into that stride.
The Librarians: A Very Serious Comedy! plays at Pleasance Two at Pleasance Courtyard until 31st August at 3:15 pm with a runtime of 60 minutes.
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