Many thanks to the North East Wales Archives, Ruthin Branch and the Meredith Edwards Papers collection for this transcript from The Oxford Mail. Thanks also to Oliver Houston for requesting access.
September 25, 1956
by Adrian Mitchell
A COMEDY OF TWO MURDERS
The murder of two unpleasant husbands is the theme of “Your Loving Wife”, which opened last night. They are killed, one slowly and painfully, the other suddenly, as the result of their wives’ envy of a rich and carefree widow.
This is not, however, an evening of Strindberg doom. The Furies do not lurk in the wings and no moral of Love and Duty is pointed. “Your Loving Wife” is a comedy, easily recognizable as such when the curtain goes up on the first scene.
It is the “rumpus room” of husband number one, cluttered with comic apparatus – a mechanical horse, a Turkish bath and a stationary exercise bicycle. Each one plays its part in the play, supplying a visual gag at the right moment.
LEFT TO HERMIONE
The second scene has fewer of the professional humourist’s properties, and is left primarily to Hermione Baddeley to keep us amused with her diabolic inflections. Luckily she can make an invitation to sit down sound link a leering proposal of an all-week orgy.
Luckily, because the lines give her and the others few chances. Too often a maze of small talk is negotiated as if the actors had left the script and were making up their own parts. Then, as the audience broods, comes a joke out of nowhere.
Some of these are welcome, others I found unpleasant, like the stomach-pump references and the author’s belief that crude insult is funny.
BAD TASTE
Bad taste is a matter of personal opinion, but jokes about physical suffering and death are difficult to handle; only the dexterity of wit in “The Trouble with Harry” of Thurber’s drawings can save them from dropping a dull thud.
Joyce Barbour as the merry widow sails gallantly around the stage. Agnes Lauchlan as wife number two works well, and Meredith Edwards as the two husbands presents two impossible and superficially different brothers satisfactorily.
There is plenty of action, knocks over the head, hiding a corpse, falling down stairs – all this and Hermione Baddeley too.
But the play is a piece of unplanned development, and although many people enjoyed it last night, it looks like a piece of jerry-building to me.