Chorus Of Disapproval, A

Based on an Alan Ayckbourn play, A Chorus of Disapproval is definitely one for Anglophiles and maybe for some others as well. For the first half-hour or so it crackles with irreverent wit and although it loses that momentum it remains overall an appealing amusement.

Jeremy Irons plays a timid office-worker who gets transferred by his company to the British seaside resort of Scarborough. Knowing no-one and recovering from the untimely death of his wife, he responds to a casting call for an amateur theatre group’s production of The Beggar's Opera. There he encounters the group's director an eccentric and irascible Welshman named Dafydd Ap Llewellyn (Anthony Hopkins) and a hot-bed of sexual frustration and small-town intrigue.

If Irons is an unconvincing choice for the diffident 9-to-5er, known simply as Guy, Hopkins is wonderful as the near-barking mad director who must whip his band of lame duck amateurs into something approaching competence. Ayckbourn’s writing is of course essential to the characterisation but Hopkins goes at the part with gusto and in so doing salves a good deal of the film’s weaknesses.

Alhough a side dalliance with the group’s sexpot Fay (Jenny Seagrove) offers some saucy amusement the rather desperate affair between Guy and Dafydd’s dowdy wife (Prunella Scales) lends a distinctively English sense of glumness that eats away at the comedic mood and the glib ending does nothing to make us feel that Winner has done the material justice.

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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