REVIEW: 2 more MASTERS of the Fringe
Bright Young Things don’t mind taking on the big ones. The company has given us, and received much audience (and Sterling Award) love for previous productions such as Sartre’s No Exit and Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea. Their current Fringe production is Tom Stoppard’s minor theatrical masterpiece, the confounding The Real Inspector Hound (Stage 12).
Two pretentious and self-important theatre critics, Moon (Mat Busby) and Birdboot (Ashley Wright) are sitting in the audience waiting for a new thriller to start. They are much more caught up in their own petty worlds than they are about what they are about to see – having made up their minds before the curtain rises. Moon is tired of being his paper’s second-string critic while Birdboot, though noisily moralistic on the surface, has fantasies about sexual escapades with the actresses on stage.
Set in a mouldering Victorian mansion, you don’t have to work too hard to see that Stoppard has placed his two bumblers in a creaky but hilarious satire of Agatha Christie plays. Pirandello and the ineffable power of theatre strike as the two find themselves on stage taking part in the action, and their increasing confusion as to what is happening to them is comic indeed.
The entire ensemble is brilliant at overplaying a whole clutch of familiar British stereotypes – any of them would be right at home in the board game Clue (Col. Mustard in the library with a candelabra etc. etc. etc.)
The Christie-like plot is too convoluted to go into but it includes a body in the middle of the floor right from the beginning. Nobody notices it. That staple of this kind of creaky thriller, the unimpressed domestic, Mrs. Drudge (Jenny McKillop), answers the phone and manages to get in a bit of stage business by saying something like, “Hello from remote Muldoon Manor on a dark afternoon with the fog coming in from the moors.” Troy O’Donnell, the implacable Inspector Hound, is given to dialogue that runs to this:
INSPECTOR: “Call the police.”
CHARACTER: “You are the police.”
INSPECTOR: “Thank God I’m here.”
Andrew MacDonald-Smith is so funny he can get a big laugh just by walking across the stage.
Others in the impeccable cast include Louise Lambert (who swoops around the stage), Belinda Cornish (who swans around the stage), Garret Ross (with an eye patch), and Mark Meer as the BBC. This well-neigh perfect production was skillfully directed by Mark Bellamy.
5 out of 5
***
For those of us whose knowledge of Greek mythology is a bit rusty, the Sirens were a group of seductive young ladies whose voices were so lovely they lured sailors who were passing by onto the rocks.
This Atlas Theatre production of Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Sirens (Stage 12) would have us believe that one of the winsome but deadly, creatures survived the end of mythology, living out the centuries on a Greek Isle. The beautiful young temptress (Louise Lambert) has just been ushered into the 21st Century by a gift from the gods, “a box with numbers” (that’s a smartphone to you). She loves to play the Sudoku app but has yet to grasp the function of the battery.
Sam (Julien Arnold) is an unhappy middle-aged American songwriter who hasn’t had a hit since he wrote a melody for his wife many years before. His wife, Rose (Stephanie Wolfe), equally bummed out, wonders if she should have married that cute guy she liked in high school.
It’s their 25th anniversary and, looking for a bit of a spark, they embark on a Greek Island cruise.
Instead of the spark they are looking for, Sam hears the call of the Sirens. Sam’s odyssey is no less (for him at any rate) than that of Ulysses. He, too, must struggle against the blandishments of the Sirens, his fear of creative failure and the increasing terrors of middle age. And, oh, like Ulysses, he must find his way back to his wife.
What fun! What a production (directed with a sure hand by Kate Ryan)! What a cast! Wolfe is a marvel. She’s feisty and scrappy as the unquenchable New York housewife whose disinterested husband is addicted to playing scrabble on the internet with a clutch of ladies – even to meeting one for coffee. Wolfe goes far beyond the cliched upper class, shrewish Jewish housewife to give a real (if comic) performance as an abandoned woman desperately trying to re-establish what is left of her life. Arnold is nebbishy and kinda sweet and sympathetic as the lost-at-sea Sam. The two pros work together as if they indeed have shared 25 years of marriage. Lambert is ravishing as the pragmatic Siren who can’t understand why Sam hasn’t perished on the rocky shores as he should have. She’s also a pushy travel agent and a bemused waitress giving each of them their own comic spin.
And Richard Millar, the boy of Rose’s high school dream, shows up (in the person of Mat Busby) proving the old adage you should never look up an old beau.
This show is assured and droll. It may be as light as a breeze on a Santorini beach, but director and cast know where the jokes (and the humanity) are and great fun is had by all.
4 out of 5
