Serpent time at theatre

The play is on a week long run in Cardiff

By Clare Gabriel BBC News Online

Take two couples trying to escape to sunny Spain for a "secret" holiday, a violent robbery and a blue holdall containing £500,000 - and what have you got?

It is all the ingredients for a fast moving sitcom force called Snakes & Ladders which is gracing the New Theatre in Cardiff this week.

Paul Nicholas: Seasoned performer

In these days of wall-to-wall soaps and reality TV which make up our daily entertainment fare we tend to have forgotten just how good a rip-roaring and farcical sitcom can be.

But writer Eric Chappell certainly has not. This brand new sitcom, who includes Rising Damp among his many successes, takes the best of all that is absurd.

For that he has the support of one of the UK's most seasoned comedy actors Paul Nicholas who stars as the hapless law-abiding Sam Spencer.

Down-on-his-luck Sam who has and wife Fay - delightfully played by Judy Buxton - find themselves fighting it out for a "borrowed" Spanish villa.

Old-fashioned

Fighting with them is Ian Ogilvy, a similarly down on his luck soap actor, who has engineered a dirty week away from his wife with a young TV cheese spread advertisement star Dodie (excellently portrayed by Rachel Rhodes).

The two couples sparring through Chappell's never-ending one-liners would be good enough.

But then there is the question of three identical holdalls and a mix-up at baggage control, which ultimately means the two down-on-their luck forty-or fifty somethings at the centre of the plot are enticed by the prospect of getting rich quick.

It is then that the sitcom - which through the confines of the stage sometimes means the actors falling over one another - moves on to an absurd level.

As a night out Snakes & Ladders provides the kind of good old-fashioned escapism that used to make up our entertainment in days gone by.

Snakes & Ladders runs at New Theatre, Cardiff, until 29 June and continues to Peterborough, Malvern, Milton Keynes, Brighton, Guildford, Cambridge and Norwich.