The Crescent Studio in Birmingham has long been one of my favourite theatre spaces and its intimacy is perfect for this ambitious pair of comedies where theatrical conventions get flouted fore and aft.
Peter Schaffer’s 1965 Black Comedy employs a clever and original device. Set during a power cut, when the stage is brightly lit the players are meant to be in darkness, but when it’s dark for the audience, it’s light for them. Hard to bring off, but here the resulting farce works, well, brilliantly.
As an eager young artist awaits a rich collector, unwelcome visits from a potential father in law, benighted neighbours and two girlfriends are complicated by a suite of borrowed furniture. The result is beautifully managed knockabout, Kevin Middleton’s direction making the difficulties of this complicated device look as easy as falling off a chair.
Harry O’Brien does a fine job of playing the increasingly desperate artist while both Sophie Gray and Joanna Ryan shine as his girl friends. Pat Dixon as the posh neighbour unused to gin and G Rhydian Morgan as the potential father in law are both splendid as the farce threatens to spiral out of control.
But there’s always a star and here it’s Barry M Dudley as the camp northern queen “I’m damp to me panties” Harold Gorringe whose posh bits have been borrowed to impress the rich buyer.
It’s a wonderful foil for the evening’s second offering, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound which brilliantly parodies just about every whodunit under the sun. So assured is the production it’s hard to believe this is actually the debut of director Helen Hotchkiss.
The play itself is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in yonks, a feast of camped-up Christie, pastiche Poirot and deconstructed Du Maurier delivered in an archly earnest style that’s exactly right and with the sharpest of eyes for period detail in diction, dress and manners.
Kate Owen is faultless as the comedy maid of all work indispensible to any country house prone to hosting murders, while Peter Neenan is sublime as the slightly foreign, slightly camp, handsomely oily charmer. Jessica Birtwistle and Rose Pardo Roques are simply sublime so utterly convincing are they as the deserving targets of all the love interest.
Philip Astle hams it up beautifully as the inevitable cantankerous invalid while Dave Rodgers is perfect as the blinkered Inspector Hound. But what takes this production to a new level is the ambivalent chorus of theatrical critics, Birdboot and Moon, played here with slightly frightening relish by the splendid William Hayes and Alex Pendleton.
This wonderfully stylised production is the slickest I’ve seen in a very long time.
