Susannah Clapp
He rhymes ye gods with senna pods. He does a good deja vu joke. He does a good deja vu joke. And he drops in a bit of French: "Je regrette ... rien," wails the constipated hypochondriac as he peers into his empty potty.
Roger McGough's light-on-its-pieds adaptation of Le Malade imaginaire, The Hypochondriac, co-produced with English Touring Theatre, follows his success last year with Tartuffe. Gemma Bodinetz's production spins along, with Lucinda Raikes as the ingenue, all saucer eyes and button mouth, and Brigid Zengeni beautifully bruising as the money-grubbing stepmother; the duping scenes are funnier than you could have thought possible.
Still, the star is McGough's script. Which produces that rare sound, an audience rocking to a rhyme: they wouldn't actually have done that to Molière, whose play was in prose. Though it begins with a fart, this is a not up-its-own-derriere version, in which, when a character comes out with a Gallic sentence, she's told that she should "speak properly". Its point may be satirical but it projects generosity.
One of the best things about the resurgence of Liverpudlian theatre is that so many shows take off from the life of the city. Clive Francis's finely judged crusty hypochondriac isn't a scouser, but Leanne Best, niece of the Beatles' first drummer Pete, gives us the accent as a vivid, snapping-eyed maid. And a lovely flourish at the end has McGough gesturing to his previous life as a Scaffolder, proposing a "medicinal compound". This isn't the sort of local resonance that stops a play travelling: on the contrary, The Hypochondriac, whose Playhouse run has been extended, goes on tour in September. A Liverpool poet has become a Liverpool playwright. Most efficacious in every way.