The Good Life

Way before environmental issues became headline news, the BBC set out its own eco-warrior stall with The Good Life, a gentle domestic comedy series about suburban self-sufficiency. Now almost 50 years later – just in time for next month’s COP26 ’save-the-planet’ conference in Glasgow – it has been adapted for the stage by writer and director Jeremy Sams.

Original writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey raised their laughs via half-hour episodes built around the hazards of keeping goats in the back garden of a house with the minimum of mod cons. Once voted Britain’s ninth favourite sitcom ever, it featured slightly irksome young couple Tom and Barbara Good holding their marriage together without any visible means of support, while snooty neighbours Margo and Jerry Leadbetter fought a losing battle to maintain their middle-class standards.

Fans will be pleased to hear that some of the funniest of the Goods’ increasingly bizarre adventures are still on offer, while new slants recognise the march of time on the ecology front, carrying a degree of pertinence for today.

But where Sams’ production comes undone is that the classic television sitcom put across its message by fitting perfectly into comedy-filled half-hour slots. However, the material becomes much thinner when stretched out over a two-hour narrative. It doesn’t help that it gets off to a decidedly pedestrian start.

The original show’s reflections on getting on with your neighbours, however different their lifestyle, is also rarely on view in Sams’ adaptation. Despite this, the best episode of all from the original 30 shows, in which Margo abandons all her airs and graces and gets down and dirty in the middle of the night to help the Goods save the life of a newly delivered piglet, is happily retained and ends up being the production’s highlight.

Penelope Keith’s pearls-and-twinset Margo was the imperious scene-stealer on television, and here Preeya Kalidas, who made her name in the West End production of Bombay Dreams, is similarly strong on both the put-downs and the snobbery, though she lacks something of Margo’s warmth beneath her hoity-toity exterior.

Rufus Hound and Sally Tatum deliver Tom and Barbara’s comic one-liners with aplomb, but completely miss the couple’s faintly annoying sense of self-satisfaction, while Dominic Rowan’s henpecked Jerry is at his best in a short scene where he admits his feelings for Barbara.

Michael Taylor’s clever, revolving set, complete with G Plan furniture and wood-burning stove, lends the action a welcome burst of activity, and Leigh Cranston’s brilliant mechanical goat Geraldine is almost worth the price of admission alone.