Run for Your Wife

Bringing a hugely popular West End stage play to the big screen is always going to be somewhat of a challenge, especially when it comes to that all-important intimate magic that can be lost in transition between the stage and the screen.  However, Run for Your Wife, Ray Cooney’s adaptation of his own play which ran for eight years in the West End, achieves the near impossible and successfully brings the stage story of a cockney cabbie and his two wives to the silver screen.

Starring some of the Estuary’s finest, Run for Your Wife is about mini-cab driver John Smith (Danny Dyer), a man who loves being married so much that he went and did it twice – consequently leading two married lives.  Firstly, John has Michelle (played by Denise Van Outen who has trodden the boards before as Roxie in Chicago) who lives in Stockwell and secondly he has Stephanie (Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding) who he lives with in Finsbury. Living this elusive life is easy for John as he is a cab driver meaning he has a ready-made alibi for long, over-night shifts, and has a common name – everything seems to be in John’s favour, until…

After a riotous case of events involving a moustached Judi Dench (who has a cameo as a bag lady), John’s bigamous marriage, which he has kept from the two women for five years, looks to be revealed.  But with the help of his hapless neighbour, Gary Gardener (Neil Morrissey), and a whole host of hilarious cameos (including Rolf Harris, Cliff Richard, Richard Briers, Lionel Blair and Andrew Sachs), somehow John might just about be saved.

There is nothing about Run for Your Wife that should be taken too seriously. On the whole the film verges on the ridiculous, but that is left over from the conversion to the big screen.  The comedy may be a little slap-stick, but with plenty of innuendos and hyper-exaggerated humour on tap, if you are a cockney-loving, Danny Dyer fan looking for a bit of light-hearted love, then this will be right up your street!

Jennifer Atkinson

Run for You Wife is released nationwide on 14^th February 2013.

Watch the trailer for Run for Your Wife here: