Vandyke Brown: A Farce in One Act

Vandyke Brown has returned from abroad expecting a quiet homecoming. Instead, he finds his wife entertaining a guest under an assumed name, a law student with romantic designs, and a servant whose loyalties are entirely unclear. The stage is set for magnificent chaos in this spry Victorian farce, where every entrance precipitates a new catastrophe and every line of dialogue contains the seeds of further misunderstanding. The titular artist, a photographer of modest talents, must navigate a web of jealousy, deception, and badly timed revelations while desperately trying to preserve both his marriage and his dignity. The comedy unfolds at a breathless pace, with characters stumbling into rooms at precisely the wrong moments, confessions bursting forth at the worst possible instants, and the absurd logic of jealousy driving reasonable people to spectacularly unreasonable behavior. Troughton proves himself a master of the form, wringing maximum hilarity from minimum circumstances. The resolution arrives through a cascade of clarifying revelations that prove jealousy was entirely unwarranted and that the tangled web of romance and deception was, in the end, entirely innocent. A deliciously silly entertainment that earns every laugh through precise comic timing and the timeless pleasure of watching smart people make fools of themselves.