‘No Sex Please’ delivers hearty dose of laughs

Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott’s "No Sex Please, We’re British" has been boring critics for decades, and though it flopped on Broadway, it was a huge success in London. Moral: Some will find this functional but rusty farce hysterically funny, while the rest of us will frequently feel left out.

The show has a surefire plot for undemanding audiences. Happy newlyweds Peter (Andrew Eddins) and Frances Hunter (Sarah Spraker) mistakenly get involved with a pornographic company. They spend most of the time making sure Peter’s elegant mummy (Susan Brown-Wadleigh) and a VIP visitor (Mark B. Avis), not to mention the police, don’t discover the nasty pictures. The desperation builds, as farces should, and by the last 10 minutes or so every move seems to produce a guffaw.

Director Walter Niejadlik made a wise choice in turning over the leads to Eddins and Spraker. Eddins is a young, boy-next-door sort of guy who comes across intelligent, passionate and quite capable of being an assistant bank manager. Spraker is extremely attractive and doesn’t play dumb as much as naive, loyal and eager to please. Both performers keep the show grounded by managing to get us to believe in the reality of their situation. And that’s no small feat. They do comedy expertly, with no show of strain.

Brown-Wadleigh had laryngitis on opening night (even a face mic couldn’t always help her), and management made a mistake in not announcing this prior to curtain. But I was surprised how well she communicated her character. As the play progressed, I just accepted her wounded voice and enjoyed the many other worthy aspects of her performance.

Garry Lunn has a brief, show-stealing role as a bank inspector. He gets to deliver the title line at a moment you least expect. The long and lean Lunn has the dashing manner of old-school British aristocracy, and I doubt he’s capable of making anything sound vulgar.

Some of the cast tries too hard. Sometimes you can feel Niejadlik setting up the physical gags. But I think he delivers what the script is all about: a hearty dose of harmless laughs for those who’d rather leave their brains at their day jobs.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.