FOUR STARS

All fur coat and no knickers — this familiar phrase might almost have been coined as a succinct description of Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s spirited, if shockingly dated, farce Not Now, Darling, which has been delighting audiences over the festive period at the Mill at Sonning.

Best remembered in a British film version of exactly 40 years ago, starring Leslie Phillips, the play possesses a tacky, decidedly unPC plot of the sort expected in the decade that taste forgot.

Directing at the Mill, Ron Aldridge moves back the action to a period even earlier, the late 1950s, framing the action with memorable music of those days, including Connie Francis’s catchy Lipstick On Your Collar (“said you were untrue”), which I was still humming on the journey home.

The setting is a high-class furriers in Knightsbridge where one of the partners Gilbert Bodley (Michael Howe) is eagerly waiting — his wife safely on holiday abroad — to lavish a £5,000 mink coat on his gorgeous stripper mistress.

The problem is how to gift it to Janie (Heather Gibbs) without his incriminating generosity being apparent to her jealous, and very dangerous, mobster husband Harry.

His solution is to encourage Harry to ‘buy’ the coat for £500, with the bulk of the purchase price secretly met by himself. To keep Gilbert at a distance from the transaction, the negotiation is to be conducted, decid-edly unwillingly, by Arnold Crouch (Patrick Monckton), the creative head of the salon and a gentleman with a tenuous grasp of the realities of life, sex included.

Harry jumps at the offer - but, sadly for Gilbert, this is with the intention of awarding the luxury garment to his own mistress, his buxom secretary Sue (Lizzie Stables). (Fans of the work of Roald Dahl might recognise a certain similarity here with the plot of his 1959 short story Mrs Blixby and the Colonel’s Coat.)
 

For reasons hardly necessary to set down - this is farce - both mistresses soon find themselves in various stages of undress, rushing into and out of cupboards, as the conspirators struggle to disguise what is going on, both from the menacing Harry and from Gilbert’s wife Maude (Belinda Carroll) who has naturally felt disposed to return early from holiday.

Doing her bit to control the chaos is the stiffly-permed middle-aged secretary Miss Whittington (Francesca Bailey), whose own tendresse for Arnold supplies another comic thread.
 

Acting here is of the traditional high standard associated with the Mill. For those old enough to remember the 1950s, the superb set (Tony Eden) and costumes (Jane Kidd), together with the aforementioned music, waft us back to that remote, and very different, time.

Until January 18

Box office: 0118 969 8000, millatsonning.com