Habeas Corpus was only Alan Bennett’s second play written in the 1960s and of its time with jokes akin to those seaside postcards drawn by Donald McGill. Patrick Marber’s production at the Chocolate Factory is a gentle homage to that era of comic farce, managed without any doors on a corridor, but with a few dropped trousers.
Set in the genteel town, next to Brighton, of Hove, we meet jaded GP Dr Arthur Wicksteed (the delightful Jasper Britton) aged 53. His wife Muriel (Catherine Russell) longs for the romance she had, before marrying Wicksteed. The beau (and I use the word loosely here) she rejected is Sir Percy Shorter (Dan Starkey), the five feet nothing president of the BMA. Shorter is in town for a medical conference. The Wicksteeds’ only child is Dennis (Thomas Josling) a tall skinny hypochondriac who fuels his medical paranoia by reading his father’s medical encyclopedia.
The doctor’s unmarried sister, she doesn’t like the word spinster and nor do I, Constance (Kirsty Besterman) longs too for a romance. Being flat chested Constance thinks her lack of a bosom deters suitors. The doctor’s house is looked after by all seeing cleaner and gossip, Mrs Swabb (Ria Jones). Constance has a devoted follower, Canon Throbbing (Matthew Cotton) described by the playwright as a celibate, who looks up girls’ skirts in trains under the cover of the Daily Telegraph but he doesn’t thrill Constance. “But the Daily Telegraph is such a respectable newspaper!” says Muriel Wicksteed.