The Shaw Festival does farce more often—and better—than pretty much anyone. It’s a crowd-pleasing, high-energy counterweight to more serious dramatic fare, and the festival’s increasingly elastic mandate allows them to mine a veritable golden age of farces.
But when you’re already so good, where do you go next?
Answer: you blow past the genre’s guardrails entirely. You accelerate until the machinery threatens to fly apart. You stack the complications so high the audience can barely keep track—and then you add another layer, and then another … just because you can.
And just to show off, you do it twice: through sheer velocity and multiplication in One for the Pot, and using impossible metatheatrical complications in Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense. Two different routes to the same destination: an audience gasping with laughter, marveling at the danger of the attempt … and thrilling to the incredible virtuosity required to pull it off.
One for the Pot: Exponential Absurdity
Farce is social comedy weaponized. It throws people of different classes, backgrounds, and aspirations into competition over some combination of money, sex and rank (usually all three), and then watches them build an elaborate house of cards to conceal inconvenient truths. Our pleasure lies in the construction. We see the deception and the danger. We see the fragile architecture teetering, and we wait, delighted, for the inevitable collapse that will force the plain, pretense-free conversation that everyone has worked so desperately to avoid.
Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton’s 1961 farce One for the Pot exemplifies this dynamic. Billy Hickory Wood, an impoverished and simple-minded young man, discovers he stands to inherit a fortune from his late father’s wealthy business partner—but only if he is proven to be his father’s sole offspring. Billy is about to cash in, when the posh and polished Rupert, a previously-unknown and identical-looking sibling, appears. Billy and his handler Charlie set out to ensure no one realizes that he and Rupert are not the same person—even Billy’s wife. What follows is relentless escalation: the core lie subdivides, and subdivides again, creating overlapping fragile bubbles of belief that pop and recombine into ever-more precarious configurations.
It’s delicious, and the production’s success begins with Michael Gianfrancesco’s dazzlingly realistic set. We are in the sumptuously finished drawing room of a posh estate, adorned with rich wood fixtures, big armchairs, a table and desk, and unique touches like a suit of armour, a gramophone, a painting on the wall, and an ottoman draped with a bear pelt. Sundry curtains decorate it, and there are multiple points of egress: two at right, one at left, and a corridor at back with exits branching further. It’s crazily substantial. And you just know that every detail has been chosen carefully—because this space will get as much of a workout as the cast.
And what a cast it is. Peter Fernandes is an absolute delight as the multiplying Hickory Woods clan: rubber-faced, rubber-voiced, careening in and out of the various exits, and switching between brothers with a virtuosity that borders on the impossible. Martin Happer’s voluble Charlie Barnet serves as the quick-thinking brains of the inheritance scheme: the character will do literally anything to secure the payday, and Happer throws himself into the commitment with infectious, booming overconfidence. Sanjay Talwar’s Jugg—delightfully sly, stealthily tippling, and ever-bribable—enables the mayhem as the requisite butler. And in a loud and cheerfully over-the-top performance, Patrick Galligan speeds around as the hard-drinking, wheelchair-bound patriarch Jonathan Hardcastle, who is the object of the entire deception. It takes a village to populate the complete high-stakes scene, and the rest of the ensemble—including Neil Barclay, Fiona Byrne, Jason Cadieux, Cassandra Consiglio, Cosette Derome, Camilla Eanga-Selenge, Madelyn Miyashita, Jade Repeta, Sepehr Reytod—execute their parts of the choreographed comedy with precision.
Chris Abraham’s direction presses the accelerator relentlessly, with a virtuosic combination of precision and misdirection borrowed from stage magic. You will roar at the portrait Billy paints before your eyes, and marvel at how Fernandes, as different Hickory Woods siblings, can seem to be in two places at once. Abraham piles up the running gags: creative uses of that bear pelt and a repeatedly malfunctioning desk, the requisite spit take sequence, and a frenzy of door-closing that starts inside the story logic, but keeps going, ever faster and further, for no reason other than it’s funny. By Act Two, I’d lost complete track of certain aspects of the plot: for instance, exactly why heiress Jennifer Hardcastle (Eanga-Selenge) supports deceiving her father. But this show spins so fast—like a precision clock with its hands whirling madly— and so funny, that I didn’t have the time or the inclination to sweat it.
One for the Pot is farce as endurance sport: an almost impossible mix of deception, detail, and awe. For level of difficulty, madcap eccentricity, and volume of laughter generated, give it an 11 out of 10.
Mission accomplished.
Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense: Farce squared
If One for the Pot cranks up the intensity of a farce by accelerating and overstuffing its already groaning frame, Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense plays a different and perhaps even more difficult game. Here, we are watching a farce of a farce, as a small cadre of non-actors stage their theatrical re-creation of an especially absurd Wodehouse misadventure.
The premise: Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s affable upper-class twit, has decided (with characteristic unfounded optimism) to dramatize for us his recent escapade involving a much-coveted silver eighteenth-century cow creamer, a tyrannical uncle, a forced engagement, and the fascist blowhard Roderick Spode. “How hard could that be?” Bertie asks, about mounting a play. The answer, of course, is “considerably harder than he’s thought through.” Happily, the far smarter butlers Jeeves and Seppings understand that good theatre requires a) scenery, sound and costumes, which they prove resourceful in sourcing and manipulating, and b) characters and conflicts, which they step boldly and bodily into bringing to life.
The adaptation by the Goodale brothers, from multiple Wodehouse stories, premiered in 2013, and its metatheatrical DNA suits Shaw’s intimate Court House Theatre perfectly. Sim Suzer’s clever set features repurposable two-sided pieces: backdrops that Jeeves supposedly sourced from “a local theatrical festival of some repute,” and which he and Seppings can move and flip as the scenes need changing. The props are wonderful; the cow creamer itself makes a coveted appearance in a deliciously staged scene that looks like something straight out of The Matrix.
The three-person cast is a miracle of chemistry and timing. Damien Atkins’s Jeeves is stiff, dry and droll: a true stage manager … until he’s unleashed to play Sir Watkyn Bassett, Madeline Bassett, and Gussie Fink-Nottle, complete with improvised costume and voice changes. When he realizes he’s backed himself into a scene requiring a conversation between two of his characters, the horror in his eyes is priceless, and the solution is a tour de force that garnered a huge ovation at the performance I attended.
Jeff Irving’s Bertie Wooster is a wide-smiling, charming and childlike naïf, who is transformatively delighted by each theatrical element added, from the sets to the spotlights, and then the car Jeeves assembles for a driving scene. He is also perpetually out of synch, continuously mistaking whether Jeeves belongs in a scene as a character, is there as himself in the present moment, or is simply adjusting scenery, like a crew member. Jeeves, ever practical, never loses the thread—and finds ways to rib both the Shaw Festival and the audience, while even prodding Wooster to deliver helpful plot summaries “for clarity.”
Finally, Travis Seetoo is an absolute delight in his role of the passive-aggressively deferential butler Seppings, who is pressed into service in the most over-the-top roles required by Wooster’s show. His fast-talking, sashaying Aunt Dahlia—smartly garbed by Suzer like a proper English Edith Prickley—had me in stitches every single time she appeared. The way he climbs inside the villain Roderick Spode, wheeling around the set with fascist menace, simply must be seen to be believed. And the real-time sound effects he provides for his fellow thespians completes the trifecta of his absurd and wonderful contributions to our laughter.
It’s farce on parallel planes: we enjoy this wildly absurd story being enacted and the even more absurd story of the three men acting it out. Two teetering houses of cards are built, one on top of the other, right before our eyes. And the depth and quality of Brendan McMurtry-Howlett’s direction is evidenced by just how improvisational—and utterly farcical— it all feels.
Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense gives us gut-bustingly funny farce and a loving, farcical tribute to the collaborative magic of theatre itself. We’re playing three-dimensional chess with a fast clock here: for level of difficulty and volume of laughter generated, it’s an 11 out of 10 …. squared.
Missions (plural) more than accomplished.
Two Paths to Joy
Neither of these shows offers profound thematic resonance. That’s not the point. No, the measure of great farce is simple: how hard, how long, and how often do we laugh.
And by this yardstick, both productions overdeliver: One for the Pot through its dizzying, high-velocity overcomplication, and Jeeves & Wooster through its playful metatheatrical mayhem. Both productions push the genre well past sane limits: the performers give everything, leaving audiences laughing so hard they are in danger of forgetting to breathe.
So when you’re already as good at farce as the Shaw Festival is, where do you go next? For 2026, the answer is simple: you don’t go anywhere. You just do the impossible.
One for the Pot runs at the Shaw Festival’s Festival Theatre through October 11, 2026. Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense runs at the Court House Theatre through September 27, 2026. Tickets are available at shawfest.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
