Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✩✩
by Peter Froehlich, directed by Richard Rose
National Arts Centre Studio, Ottawa
March 29-April 10, 2004;
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace,
Toronto
April 27-May 30, 2004
Simpl is a play about Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt, still revered as Germany’s two greatest comedians. Though they performed only in café-theatres and beer halls, even such notables as Beckett and Brecht recognized their greatness. Their verbal and physical comedy in which order so easily turns into chaos, sense into nonsense, makes them forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd and Monty Python. Anyone who has seen a revue of their sketches in Germany knows how deliriously funny their work can be.
Alas, this humour seldom shines through in Simpl. Author Peter Froehlich has collected a number of the team’s best-known sketches and comic songs and intertwines them with the story of Valentin (Peter Froehlich) and Karlstadt (Nicola Lipman) from their first meeting in 1911 to their last performance at the Café Simpl in 1946. The show would have served the two best simply as a revue based on their work. The biographical material is so sketchy and the “real” dialogue so flat that it dissipates any build-up in comic energy. As an examination of the artist’s role under totalitarianism, it’s like a pallid, gender-reversed Cabaret with limp comic routines instead of songs.
Lipman, an expert at playing exasperation, gives the grittiest, most focussed performance of the evening. At his best Froehlich suggests Peter Sellers, though one whose comic timing is often off kilter. Peter Tiefenbach, their accompanist, has some of the musical humour of Victor Borge but his acting is overemphatic. Richard Rose’s start-and-stop pacing does the material no favours.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-05-26.
Photo: Peter Tiefenbach, Nicola Lipman and Peter Froehlich. ©2004 .
2004-05-06
simpl