Thank God it's Friday

Call me perverse or too much of a soft touch in the stalls. But I was deluged with wave upon wave of comic pleasure last night.

My laughter scarcely abated during this dark comedic, light farcical, deadly satirical romance about the lower depths of the American newspaper business in Chicago, with lashings and dashings of corruption, bribery and justice denied. My Girl Friday is a luscious theatrical cocktail, a three-star smasher concocted by American playwright John Guare.

The play, in the deft, zippy organising of Jack O'Brien's superbly acted production, delights because it conveys such a sharp, timeless impression of tabloid journalists in for the kill. Here are men so hot in pursuit of the story about an innocent man due to hang that they treat morality and compassion as reject items.

In their big hats and dirty raincoats, slumped in a criminal court press room, these men are hunters, more like rats than wolves. They shamelessly make up interviews, invent the condemned man's last words to save him the trouble and "write what our bosses tell us to". How very unlike the newspaper life of our own dear nation today, or is it?

This new version of My Girl Friday has been whisked into stage life, by mixing The Front Page, that famous Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play of 1929 and Howard Hawks's movie adaptation. Hawks injected a touch of romance into the original script, by making Hildy Johnson, the male reporter whose editor Walter Burns stops at almost nothing to prevent leaving, into Burns's own divorced wife. Guare has changed the location from 1929 to August 1939 and introduced satirical snatches of conversation - far too few of them - to suggest how little Americans thought about intervening in Europe or challenging Hitler.

Bob Crowley's clever play within a play idea is to make his fine black and white design of the Chicago criminal court press room, with view of skyscrapers, into a film-studio shoot. What a magnificent spiral of conspiracy, pandemonium, bribery and panic is gradually achieved as Kerry Shale's condemned man, Earl, shoots his way out of the cell and climbs his way into the almost deserted press room.

There Alex Jennings's exquisitely amusing Walter Burns, all cool languor, understated deviousness and wild hyperbole, pits his wits and wiles against assorted journalists, crooked authority figures and Sam Beazley's delightful vicar, beaming with senile confusion.

Burns sees a world exclusive looming, not to mention the exposure of David Ross's furtive sheriff and Harry Towb's corrupt mayor, who looks about as trustworthy as a snake.And who better to write the precarious scoop than Zoe Wanamaker's hilarious, hard-bitten Hildy.

On the verge of marriage, she has returned to give her goodbye to journalism. But when she finds herself faced with hysterical Earl and Nicola Stephenson as a genuinely touching tart with a heart, she cannot resist the call of a deadline or chance of escape from her dim new fiancé and mother-in-law to be - Margaret Tyzack in tremendous abusive form as a hater of women writers.

No great matter that there is insufficient sexual electricity crackling between Jennings and Miss Wanamaker, who, in pillbox hat and with an air of flinty professionalism, mints golden clichés on the typewriter to the manner reborn. This gorgeous comic feast can do without much Eros.

His Girl Friday