Review: Three Men in a Boat 'a heady sense of fun'

A theatre on the river, could there be a better place to stage Three Men in a Boat?

Jerome K Jerome’s comic book follows three young chaps on a boating holiday on the Thames, winding their way from Kingston to Oxford.

As a fan of the book, I was excited and a little nervous to see how a river, boats, George, Harris and J – to say nothing of the dog – could be brought to the stage – but rest assured, there’s a steady hand on the tiller as well as a heady sense of fun.

Adapted by Clive Francis and directed by Joe Harmston, the production honours the text while bringing it to vivid life. Sean Cavanagh’s ingenious set later becomes a station, a box office and changing river vistas but begins domestically at our narrator’s rooms in the city.

Three friends decide they are fed up with London life and have the notion to row up the river. They are stressed by ‘overwork, even though Jerome, known as J, (played with aplomb by George Watkins) tellingly muses: “I like work, it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

With companions George and Harris (James Bradshaw and Sean Rigby, each skilfully slipping into other characters) J heads to the Thames, the set ingeniously turning from his London rooms to a riparian backdrop complete with gliding boat.

Montmorency, the fox terrier, is invisible but is conjured up in all his rascally glory by the actors. They are, literally, barking – but it works.

We head through Walton, Chertsey, Runnymede and beyond, through meals, locks and comic set pieces. The trio try to open a tin of pineapple, drink tea made from river water, admire a giant trout claimed multiple fishermen and dash round Datchet in search of a bed.

The boat glides on to Old Windsor, Maidenhead ‘too snobby to be pleasant’ (that delighted the audience) and, pleasingly, Sonning itself.

Though the book was late Victorian, there’s something Jeeves and Woosterish in the tone. 

There’s even a direct lift from PG Wodehouse in the script, the wonderful image of a tubby chap ‘who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'

Director Joe Harmston has brought the setting forward in time, not to Bertie’s Jazz Age but to the years leading up to the Great War, bringing a touch of shade to this river spree.

Unlike narrator J, it works.

Three Men in a Boat is showing at The Mill at Sonning until Saturday, July 13.