A DELIGHTED audience cheered all the actors who launched the new season of repertory plays at Windsor’s Theatre Royal on Tuesday – and why not?

A DELIGHTED audience cheered all the actors who launched the new season of repertory plays at Windsor’s Theatre Royal on Tuesday – and why not?

After two and a half hours of playing a middle aged Prime Minister surrounded by women in their underwear, actor Jonathan Ray took his bow and dropped the disguise.

He was immediately revealed as a young actor who had successfully been playing a much older man, thereby pinpointing exactly what old-fashioned repertory was all about.

The audience responded at once and will doubtless be taking up Mr Ray’s invitation to return next week to see many of the same actors play different roles in the next production.

Unfortunately Pardon Me Prime Minister also pinpointed a less fortunate aspect of old-fashioned repertory. The plays could be very corny – and this particular farce is painfully dated.

We are offered an idiotic PM, rushing round in a panic as all the women he meets lose their clothes. He has a puritanical, Scottish misery guts of a Chancellor who keeps appearing just as another naked woman is being pushed into the library next door. There is a put upon male secretary who gets set upon by the archetypal sex starved spinster who takes her glasses off and lets her hair down.

There is a woman journalist whose dress gets ripped off. They all end up in the library. The play was clearly written in the 1970s when Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford were trying to clean up England and every self-respecting Tory government would promise to rid the nation of vice. But even that element of satire is irrelevant nowadays, when vice can emerge triumphant from any teenager’s computer screen.

We are left with a farce that might comfortably have filled an hour. But it has been extended to last for two and a half.

There are only so many times a half naked girl can get pushed into the adjoining library as the pompous Scottish Chancellor bursts in once again – all ready to be shocked.

The cast give it their all. The aforementioned Jonathan Ray does an athletic rubber limbed turn as the put upon Prime Minister, literally hurling himself across the stage.

I will long remember Stephanie Willson’s total dementia as she discards her glasses and assaults the meek and terrified PM’s secretary – played with likeable and effective understatement by Alec Fellows-Bennett.

Daniele Coombe is nicely scatty as the PM’s wife and Sarah Kempton makes a nicely brassy unwanted, naked visitor to the PM’s inner sanctum.

FRANCIS BATT