Based on the hugely successful British television series and adapted for the stage by its original writing team, Jeremy Lloyd and David Cfroft, this uproarious comedy relates the adventures of Rene, a hapless café owner in occupied France during World War Two.
The show’s premise is not to make fun of the war but to spoof war-based film and television dramas, in particular the drama Secret Army Many of the elements and characters are directly taken from Secret Army, such as the café owner René having an affair in the restaurant under the nose of his wife Edith, the enmity between the Gestapo and the German military, a valuable hidden painting, and a pair of British airmen trying to evade the Germans and get back to England.
René, who occasionally directly addresses the audience to explain the plot’s many twists and turns, spends the entire show trying to navigate around these and many other unlikely road-blocks, resulting in a never-ending series of farcical situations.
