Want Breezy Fun? ‘Think of England’

“Shut Your Eyes and Think of England,” a British farce with modest ambitions, receives an appropriately breezy and innocuous staging at the Knightsbridge Theatre in Pasadena.

John Chapman and Anthony Marriott’s arch dialogue pokes fun at England’s not-too-distant financial troubles, when the influx of Arab money threatened the very core of the country’s centuries-encrusted class snobbery. A meek, befuddled accountant (Jonathan Sheets) masquerades as an ailing tycoon (Don Savage) in sensitive strategic negotiations with a wealthy sheik (James Rice). Amusing if predictable, director Roxanne Barker’s staging builds comic momentum on caricatures rather than characters.

In most cases, this works: Sheets makes a particularly appealing lead, a cringing cross between Peter Sellers and former Prime Minister John Major, while Rice turns the sheik into a meddling yenta. Claire Benedek, Rachel French and Margaret McCarley play the women whose amorous allegiances are also turned topsy-turvy.

Anthony Duke brings a Mel Brooks-ish frenzy to the sheik’s Jewish solicitor, and Eric Anderson plays a homosexual doctor--both targets for some unpleasant jabs that might be wounding in a context requiring reflection. Dialects, where there are any, can be problematic; woefully miscast Peter Finlayson turns the part of a manipulative, hypocritical government minister into something resembling a walrus on Thorazine.

*

* “Shut Your Eyes and Think of England,” Knightsbridge Theatre, 35 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. Fridays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, noon. Ends July 11. $15. (626) 440-0821. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.