Jeeves & Wooster At The Shaw Festival
I have a vague suspish that Robert and David Goodale must have seen The 39 Steps or Stones In His Pockets and thought, “Jolly good fun! How hard can it be?”
And so, taking the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse stories of the amiable, high-born twit Bertram Wooster and his unflappable butler Reginald Jeeves as their text, they set about to create Jeeves & Wooster.
The fruit of their labours is now receiving an energetic Canadian premiere at the Shaw Festival’s Court House Theatre.
Jeeves & Wooster is one of those gay romps in which two or three actors create a whole world of colourful characters. It’s a great way to keep production costs down while allowing audiences (God bless ‘em) to marvel that actors can change characters so quickly, using so many different voices and accents, and manage to make it all seem effortless.
Little do they know how little they know about the little tricks that talented professional actors know. After all, these thesps have spent years learning them, you know.
The brothers G have zeroed in on “The Code of the Woosters,” arguably the best of the eleven novels and thirty-five short stories Wodehouse devoted to Jeeves & Wooster.
Their conceit is to have Bertie (Jeff Irving) tell us of his latest brainstorm. Encouraged by friends at the Drones, the London club where his idle rich contemporaries while away their considerable leisure hours, he has decided to turn one of his more recent adventures into a theatrical presentation. We are apparently his invited audience.
He enlists the aid of his gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves to assist in the endeavour. Right on cue, Jeeves (Damien Atkins) shimmers in. Since the job is too great for one manservant, Seppings (Travis Seetoo), the butler of his aunt Dahlia, is dragooned into service.
In two shakes of a duck’s tail we are involved in an imbroglio that will test the Wooster soul as it had seldom been tested before. I allude to the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Basset, Stiffy Byng, the Rev. H. P. (“Stinker”) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
Readers who worship at the feet of P. G. Wodehouse (and I count myself among that devout congregation) will recognize that I crib liberally from the Master. And as one of Jeeve’s wheezes might have it “Aye, there’s the rub.”
You see, the printed tales of the misadventures of Jeeves & Wooster are related by Bertie himself. While the convoluted plots have their amusing aspect, and while much of the dialog is risible, fully 85.3 percent of humour lies in Bertie’s narration.
Observers with the kind of literary street cred that I could never muster, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell among them, have deemed Wodehouse one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language. Of course, there are rotters who disagree, but that’s the English for you.
Translating Jeeves & Wooster to the stage, film, or television leaves all that deliciously funny prose on the cutting room floor, as it were, rendering the resulting work a pale reflection of the original.
Then, too, there’s the matter of casting. I suppose all Jeeves & Wooster aficionados have their favourite interpreters of these immortals. For me, and I dare say for many, many others, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry are the ne plus something, the sine qua whatever-it-is of Wodehouse adaptations. Whoever attempts to blot their memory from my mind’s eye has her (or his) work cut out for him (or her).
None of these considerations seem to have deterred Robert and David from forging ahead with their Jeeves & Wooster and more power to them. They have created an entertainment that kept a full house laughing for the two hour’s traffic of their stage.
Director Brendan McMurtry-Howlett (a name that might have been borrowed from a Wodehouse work) has directed, shall we say, vigorously. Much of the goings on are rather strenuously overdone, but that, I am forced to admit, is one of the seeming requirements of the genre.
Besides, it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are going to call upon an actor to overdo it, Damien Atkins is just the chappie you want. His take on Jeeves cannot be faulted. His renditions of the Bassetts, père et fille, are priceless.
Seetoo, too, proves himself an able overplayer. One of the show’s more amusing whims is the ever-growing, over-towering depiction of Roderick Spode, the most amusingly ludicrous fascist to appear on any stage until Donald Trump claimed the mantle, and Seetoo has great fun with the idea.
For his part, Irving does a good job as Bertie and his physical grace serves him well. But, well . . . you know. Hugh Laurie.
Sim Suzer has confected a number of clever set pieces that Atkins and Seetoo move in and out of position as required. (Don’t tell IATSE!) She has also provided seemingly ad hoc costume elements to help Bertie’s assistants assume their various guises.
Kaileigh Krysztofiak offers witty lighting cues that have the amusing effect of seeming to catch Bertie off guard.
All in all a decent effort on the part of all concerned. I can’t say that the brothers G’s take on Jeeves & Wooster left me disgruntled, but I will confess that, despite their best efforts, I never felt entirely gruntled.
Jeeves & Wooster continues at the Shaw Festival’s Court House Theatre through October 10, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Shaw Festival website.
Footnote: By the way, if you have a dead loved one with whom you’d like to chat one last time, bring them to Jeeves & Wooster. The blast of music that opens the show will wake them with a start. Sound design courtesy of Olivia Wheeler.
