Jeeves Takes Charge, playing at Charing Cross Theatre, does not attempt to reproduce Wodehouse’s expansive world through a large cast or elaborate scenery. Instead, it compresses that world into one performer and one room, relying on acting, storytelling and carefully judged video design to supply what is physically absent.
There is a particular challenge in holding a stage alone for almost two hours. In Jeeves Takes Charge, Sam Harrison does considerably more. He plays Bertie Wooster, his impeccably composed valet Jeeves and more than 20 other characters, moving rapidly between them through changes in voice, expression, posture and physical rhythm. It is a remarkable display of versatility and stamina.
The world he inhabits belongs to P. G. Wodehouse. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881–1975) wrote more than 70 novels and around 300 short stories, and is best known for creating Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. His career also extended into musical theatre: he wrote lyrics for more than 200 songs, worked with composers including Jerome Kern, and at one point had five musicals running simultaneously on Broadway.
Wodehouse’s own life offers some clues to the peculiar social world of his fiction. His parents worked in Hong Kong, then a British colony, while he spent much of his childhood in England in the care of relatives. He was looked after by more than 20 ‘aunts’, a biographical detail difficult to separate from the formidable women who later populated his stories and repeatedly interfered in Bertie’s life.
At the centre of Jeeves Takes Charge is a wonderfully simple relationship. Bertie is a wealthy young gentleman with a particular talent for getting himself into trouble; Jeeves is his calm, observant and considerably more intelligent valet. Around them unfolds a world of country houses, troublesome engagements, formidable aunts and upper-class social mishaps. Bertie creates the problems; Jeeves is invariably several steps ahead.
Much of Wodehouse’s comedy lies in language: elaborate sentences, verbal misunderstandings, period expressions and distinctly British wordplay. For those less familiar with his language, the rapid dialogue can be difficult to follow at times. But Harrison makes the comedy both visible and verbal.
The origins of the production go back more than four decades. Director and co-adaptor Hugh Wooldridge first encountered Wodehouse as a schoolboy, when a teacher would put aside the textbooks and read his class the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves. Years later, Wooldridge worked as assistant to Eric Thompson on Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn’s musical Jeeves.
In 1980, actor Edward Duke invited his brother James Duke and Wooldridge, his school friend, to turn Wodehouse’s stories into a one-person show. The result was Jeeves Takes Charge, adapted by the three of them and originally performed by Edward Duke, who went on to receive the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Around 40 years later, the pandemic prompted Wooldridge to consider reviving the show. At a time when a single illness could halt a large production, a play requiring only one performer suddenly had obvious possibilities. It took him two years to find the right performer: Sam Harrison, who had already played Bertie Wooster in the musical By Jeeves.
In Harrison’s hands, however, the one-person format becomes much more than a practical solution. Bertie and Jeeves are only the beginning. Harrison moves between more than 20 characters, often within the same conversation, with no costume changes or ensemble to help establish who is who. A turn of the body, a shift in vocal register or a fleeting expression is enough to bring another character into the room. What makes the performance so effective is that, after a while, the stage no longer feels occupied by one actor. It feels populated.
The visual design follows a similar principle. The basic set remains largely fixed throughout the performance, with no elaborate scene changes or movement of scenery. Instead, set and video designer Caite Hevner uses projection with considerable precision to transform the space. Some of the most effective details are also the smallest. Frames hanging on the walls initially appear empty, but paintings and images appear inside them, disappear, and change. What looks like an ordinary piece of scenery becomes a projection surface, while background images alter the atmosphere and suggest different locations without requiring the physical set to move. The video rarely calls attention to itself. Rather than serving as a spectacular backdrop, it is carefully integrated into the set’s architecture. A picture changes here, an image appears there, and the room becomes somewhere else.
This creates an elegant parallel with Harrison’s performance: just as one actor shifts from character to character, a single space moves from place to place. Both transformations depend less on spectacle than on the audience’s willingness to follow. That economy is one of the production’s greatest strengths. Jeeves Takes Charge does not attempt to reproduce Wodehouse’s expansive world through a large cast or elaborate scenery. Instead, it compresses that world into one performer and one room, relying on acting, storytelling and carefully judged video design to supply what is physically absent.
Wodehouse’s comedy is inseparable from a particular kind of English language and social world, and not every verbal detail will be equally accessible to a contemporary audience. Yet Harrison’s performance and Hevner’s visual transformations offer pleasures beyond the words. The most memorable trick of Jeeves Takes Charge is ultimately a theatrical one: one actor becomes an entire cast, and one room becomes an entire world.
Jeeves Takes Charge is playing at Charing Cross Theatre through to September 6.
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