Lizzie Lawton’s Robert, left, and Max Palmer’s Bernard in vexed conversation with Val Debenedetti’s Italian air hostess Gabriella in Rowntree Players’ Boeing Boeing. Picture: Jamie McKeller
LEEDS Conservatoire musical theatre masters graduate and freelance theatre-maker Hannah Shaw is directing her second Rowntree Players production of 2026.
After her LGBTQ+ exploration of gay playwright Oscar Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” The Importance Of Being Earnest in March, she now pilots Marc Camoletti’s high-flying French farce Boeing Boeing, cleared for take-off with five cast members – Bethan Olliver, Jorja Cartwright, Lizzie Lawton, Max Palmer and Rebecca Thomson – returning from her Wilde nights.
Newly on board is Val Debenedetti, who draws on her Italian heritage to play the hot-blooded Gabriella, one of three air hostesses engaged to Palmer’s philandering American architect Bernard.
Rebecca Thomson’s house maid Bertha, fielding yet another problematic phone call in Boeing Boeing. Picture: Jamie McKeller
Shaw introduces all three fiancées, along with Bernard, his gloriously blunt, long-suffering French housemaid, Thomson’s Berthe, and his long-lost friend, Lawton’s callow, gauche Robert, from Wisconsin, in a pre-show sequence in the style of TV credits (think Friends, for example), set to Jennifer Carney’s choreography of Max Barron’s Sixties sitcom theme pastiche.
This establishes both the characters’ individual style and the location, Bernard’s Parisian apartment, with its seven doors – or eight if you count the central double doors – in Camoletti’s 1960 setting, adapted in 1962 by Beverley Cross and Francis Evans. In front is a large sofa, with a leather chair to one side, a bean bag to the other, a drinks trolley, a spinning globe, bannisters by the doors and a regularly ringing phone.
In the tradition of farce, Camelotti’s smart, stylish comedy starts in a haven of calm, where Palmer’s self-satisfied Bernard is the cat with the full-fat cream, utilising the timetables dextrously to juggle his time with his airline fiancées, first Olliver’s apple-pie American Gloria, next Debenedetti’s tempestuous Gabriella, and lastly, Cartwright’s slightly frightening, no-nonsense German, Gretchen.
Each entry is designated by their airline colour – red, blue, yellow – lighting up a door, immediately followed by a sound ‘sting’ from Barron’s compositional tool box, keeping the audience one step ahead every time those signals are repeated.
Into the farcical mix is stirred the interruptive presence of Lawton’s Robert, who has not seen Bernard for more than 18 years and is determined to make up for lost time, never leaving the apartment, always interjecting with a suggestion and then playing his own cards with Cartwright’s Gretchen.
As in The Importance Of Being Earnest, Lawton (they/them) favours a physical form of comedy acting, constantly on the move and no less frenetic in their line delivery.
Lizzie Lawton’s jaunty, livewire Robert in Boeing Boeing. Picture: Jamie McKeller
It plays well against Palmer’s more laidback performance style, his calm-in-the-face-of-a-storm Bernard contrasting with the almost volcanic flow of suggestions and reactions from busy Lizzie’s Robert.
Shaw does not update the Sixties setting, but she has cut the backside-patting tropes, the women all the stronger for being empowered to be the decision makers, including Thomson’s ever-exasperated Berthe demanding an ever-rising pay increase.
Camelotti’s men are exposed as chancers, flippant and indeed weak, despite thinking they hold the upper hand, when in fact the women call the shots.
Consequently, Camelotti’s French frolic retains its Parisian air, Sixties chic and outrageously clichéd national stereotypes – from the jet-set age when air hostesses were the height of glamour – but the humour is liberated from its period chains and now feels more truthful.
Shaw’s cast delights in the ever-quickening chaos of comedy that is frothy and frivolous, but deftly delivered, choreographed slickly with the doors in constant use. The performances are fun, the men, flighty; the air hostesses, saucy but sassy; Berthe, the Shakespeare’s Fool of the piece.
Rowntree Players present Boeing Boeing, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight until Saturday, 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.