Ceased Lighting
Black Comedy (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond) Guest Review by Dr Terror
It was one of the hottest bank holiday Mondays ever. 34 degrees had been recorded in Kew next door. So what does Doctor Terror do? He goes to the theatre, of course. I'm not sure what the air conditioning arrangements are at the Orange Tree, but the packed, in-the-round auditorium was very refreshing. I had never been here before and a sealed envelope with my handwritten name on it was waiting on my seat to welcome me. How splendid! You don't get that at the Palladium.
Black Comedy is a farce, a whole genre of play whose participants, by and large, should be locked up. Just as I'm profoundly grateful I was never dragged to a panto when I was a kid, so I offer up thanks to the gods that I was too skint at the time ever to go to a Whitehall Farce, written, I gather, by the likes of Ray Cooney and featuring Brian Rix with his trousers round his ankles. If either of these two things had occurred, I am convinced I would never again have visited a theatre in my life. For those who want to know what they are missing, may I suggest the film of Run For Your Wife, easily the worst ever made (while The Room and Plan Nine From Outer Space elicit unintended laughs, this fails to elicit any laughs at all) , despite featuring the unlikely combination of Dame Judi Dench, Danny Dyer and Barry Cryer (not to mention Rolf Harris and Cliff!)
So why go to this? If they are done well, even instances of entertainment representing genres I abhor can be great, and this is perfection itself. For a start, it's by Peter Shaffer who is hardly known as a farceur and while he may lack his twin brother Anthony's (The Wicker Man, Sleuth, Death on the Nile) gift for...well...black comedy, there are actually plenty of laughs in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Amadeus and even Equus, if you look for them. In fact, it was the programme for London's current production of Equus that alerted me to this performance. Great marketing!
The idea is a simple one: a fuse blows. The twist is that, when the cast are in darkness, we see them and when THEIR light is restored, we get a blackout. Simple inversion. When someone shines a torch or strikes a match, we see in the semi darkness. Great premise, eh? But what Shaffer does with it is sublime. Never has the principle of Chekhov's gun been demonstrated so archly or so joyously: you KNOW the priceless antique Buddha is going to end up in smithereens, but just how and when?
I last saw this play in 1998 at what was then the Comedy Theatre (now the Harold Pinter) starring a young unknown called David Tennant (I hear he's had a few bits and pieces of work more recently). The ensemble cast here are every bit as good and the play benefits greatly from being done in the round and having the characters scrambling around in and frequently interacting with the audience.
I especially liked Jason Barnett as the pompous, blistering Colonel. They say a good actor can cry on cue. He appears to be able to SWEAT on cue, a talent supposedly denied Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor who, I believe, in a final act if humiliation, was recently unfriended by the King on Instagram. Witty observers point out that, in recent months, he might be getting the hang of it, after all.