You Can't Take It With You

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You Can't Take It With You drops a conventional young man's stiff, wealthy parents into a household where somebody is writing plays because a typewriter turned up by mistake, somebody else is manufacturing fireworks in the cellar, and a ballet lesson is under way in the living room. They arrive for dinner on entirely the wrong night. Alice is the one member of the family who holds down a job and would like, just once, to be ordinary. She is engaged to her employer's son. The plan is a quiet, well-managed dinner at which her relatives behave themselves. What happens instead involves an unannounced arrival, a printing misunderstanding, the fireworks and a set of federal agents, in an order that gets away from everybody. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote it in 1936 and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year. It is a machine of a play - three acts, one room, an escalating sequence of arrivals - and it has been in production more or less continuously since, largely because the construction is so reliable that it works in almost any hands. Underneath the farce sits a plain argument, made in the middle of the Depression: that a life arranged around money is a worse life than one arranged around whatever you actually enjoy. The play states it outright and then spends three acts demonstrating it with a house full of people doing exactly as they please. It suits audiences who want a comedy with warmth rather than edge, and it plays well across generations. Live, the accumulating chaos is the pleasure - the room fills up, the timing tightens, and the laughs start arriving in waves.