A big part of my job in this review will be to draw a line between my experience of this production and the experience I think you’ll be likely to have if you see it.
The second part of that equation is simple: The Play That Goes Wrong is a farce and it’s being performed here by some of Vancouver’s finest comic actors, including Zander Eke, Ben Elliott, Andrew McNee, and Kelli Ogmundson. If you see this show, you will, in all probability, laugh your face off — so, in that sense, this review is a recommendation.
To go deeper, let’s start with the set-up: in The Play That Goes Wrong, we’re attending the opening night of the Cornley Drama Society’s amateur production of The Murder at Haversham Manor, a twenties whodunnit that bears a striking resemblance to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. In this play-within-the-play, Charles Haversham is found dead in the private quarters of his stately home. When Inspector Carter arrives, suspects include Charles’s fiancée Florence and her brother Thomas, Charles’s brother Cecil, and Charles’s butler Perkins.
As props malfunction, set pieces fall apart, and cues get screwed up, the comedy is driven by the actors’ escalating desperation within the mounting chaos.
Here’s where the line between my experience and (likely) yours starts: surprise is a major driver of comedy, and I saw an amateur production of The Play That Goes Wrong just last summer, so there was considerably less discovery for me this time around and I wasn’t bustin’ a gut like my first-timer companion was.
More interestingly (to me) — and paradoxically — comparing lasts year’s mounting by Black Box Theatre and this year’s Arts Club version, my take is that the Arts Club iteration suffers somewhat from its professionalism.
Ryan Cormack’s lovely, detailed set is the most obvious illustration of this point: it has clearly been built on an Arts Club budget; there is no way the Cornley Drama Society could have afforded it.
More subtly, in Josh Epstein’s direction of the piece, the straightforward physical comedy of The Play That Goes Wronghas become a much more self-conscious exercise in — and commentary on — style.
Let me break that down a bit. Because, watching last summer’s production, I recognized the Cornley Drama Society’s actors as human beings, I was directly invested in their struggle. In contrast, Epstein’s take puts much more focus on what bad actors these folks are: Genevieve Fleming’s Florence is a pastiche of melodramatic gestures, for instance, and Praneet Akilla’s Inspector Carter is so self-consciously stiff he can barely walk across the stage. There are comic rewards to this approach, but there’s also a degree of judgment that’s alienating: because I was being directed to look at the actors through the lens of their facility with style as opposed to the lens of their humanity (relatively speaking), I cared about them less, and that reduced the stakes of their struggle.
I feel much the same about the deliberateness of much of the staging in Epstein’s take. There’s a lovely bit of text in the second act, for instance, in which the company gets trapped in a whirlpool of repeating dialogue because the performer playing Perkins can’t remember the line what would get them out of it. (These things happen.) Instead of showing us the desperation of recognizable humans who are sizzling under the heat of the audience’s gaze, Epstein gives us the cartoon version: on every repetition of the cycle, the action gets bigger and bigger until the actors are careening around the stage in exaggerated fury. This approach has its own comic energy, but, to me, it also feels calculated: “Look at us! Look at what we’re doing with this business!”
Because there’s a sense of illustration in Epstein’s take, and because disaster seems to be a given from the get-go, there’s far less of a sense of escalation and that’s a big loss.
But there’s still a lot to love.
Playing Max, the actor playing Cecil, Zander Eke is hilarious. The ultimate ham, Eke’s Max laps up every bit of audience response as if it’s intended entirely for him — and he replies with self-delighted little bows. When Max starts to illustrate his speeches with charades for every word, Eke is so inventive these passages became the best parts of the evening for me.
As a stagehand named Annie who is forced to take over the role of Florence when the original actor, played by Fleming, is indisposed, Kelli Ogmundson goes an eccentric direction, underplaying Annie’s investment in the part until Fleming’s character recovers, wants the role back, and Annie turns downright murderous in her territoriality: the understatement of Ogmundson’s violence, its elemental sadism — combined with some great physical business — is a large part of what makes this work.
And, playing Charles, Ben Elliott is Mr. Steady Eddy, by which I mean his performance — as a corpse — is always centred and reliably funny.
I know what they say: comparison is odious. I also find it interesting and potentially instructive.
This production made me laugh, it never bored me, and I appreciate the skills that are on display. If you buy tickets, you’ll probably have an even better time.
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG By Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, and Jonathan Sayer. Directed by Josh Epstein. An Arts Club Theatre production running at the Granville Island Stage until August 16. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: (This photo of Zander Eke is by Moonrider Productions. The costume is by Jessica Oostergo)
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