Candlelight’s Forum Theatre.
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Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s dreary 1967 sex farce Not Now, Darling has a mechanical plot, witless dialogue, and snickering 12-year-old-boy attitudes about sex. In short, it lacks everything that makes Cooney’s later work fun, most notably his brilliant political farce Out of Order. It even lacks Cooney’s trademark double-entendre title (Wife Begins at Forty, Run for Your Wife).
Director Bill Pullinsi must have sensed the weakness of the script, because he packed his cast with so many strong comic actors: Dale Benson, Greg Vinkler, Pamela Webster, Lori Kathryn Holton. But they’re all defeated by the material. The women are reduced to slabs of comic meat by the script’s sexism, and the men don’t fare much better. Benson, as the furrier’s associate, works five times as hard as an actor ought to, cringing, mugging, chewing the scenery, trying to squeeze a few snickers out of his flat lines. And he gets them only from the most easily amused members of the audience.
