Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✩✩✩
by Alan Ayckbourn, directed by Ted Dykstra
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
May 8-June 27, 2015
Delia: “You can tell a great deal from people’s bedrooms”
Anyone involved in theatre will tell you that comedy is more difficult to bring off than tragedy. And, of the genres of comedy, farce is the most difficult. The reason is that in farce the comedy rests not on intricacy of character or language but on intricacy of action. Direction and ensemble work must be tight and pacing and timing become all-important. If any of these become slack the highly artificial mechanism of the farce shows through replacing the hilarity of distraction with the tedium of watching cogs turn.
The latter is true of Soulpepper’s latest attempt at farce, Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce from 1975. Ted Dykstra is at the helm as he was for Soulpepper’s generally successful production of The Norman Conquests (1973) Ayckbourn’s complex trilogy of interlocking comedies. Bedroom Farce is not as good a play as any of the three Norman plays and does not seem to inspire Dykstra nor most of his cast. Only one of the eight cast members, Derek Boyes, is a Soulpepper regular, two are in their second year and four are making their Soulpepper debuts. It’s not too surprising, then, that Dykstra had trouble drawing a uniform acting style from them or a sense of ensemble. The individuals actors seem more to be competing with each other for attention than acting towards a single goal.
It is surprising, however, that Dykstra’s pacing is so lax. We should be so caught up in the plot that we don’t notice the play’s multiple implausibilities. In this Bedroom Farce, they are all too obvious.
The stage presents us with three bedrooms, decorated in completely distinct styles, in three different houses in London. Designer Ken MacKenzie has ensured for the most part that each bedroom immediately encapsulates the class and cultural level of the couples who use it. Ayckbourn’s stage directions specify cross-fades from room to room, but Dykstra has had Louise Guinand do these far too languidly.
Of Ayckbourn’s four couples, the happiest, nestled in their homey, traditional, wainscotted bedroom, are the sixtysomething couple Ernest (Derek Boyes) and Delia (Corinne Koslo). When we first see them they are getting ready to go out to celebrate their wedding anniversary. When they return later, disappointed with the meal, they decide to be naughty and have pilchards on toast in bed – likely the naughtiest thing they’ve done in bed for some time. Yet they are comfortable with each other and clearly value companionship and cosiness above all else. Dykstra even has them fall asleep together holding hands.
While Boyes gives us a rather generic British male, cheery but slightly dim, Koslo gives the best performance in the show. The intensity that she gives simply to putting on her makeup when we first see her is amusing, and she is the only one of the cast who times her remarks perfectly and delivers them in just the right tone to maximize their comic effect.
They are the parents of Trevor (Ron Pederson), one of the main troublemakers in the show, but their only visitor is Trevor’s wife Susannah (Amy Matysio). When Susannah wants to stay over, Ayckbourn has Delia tell Ernest to sleep in the spare room and let Susannah sleep in the same double bed with her. Here Ayckbourn is letting his plot requirements overrule plausibility. Ernest and Delia have previously discussed not liking Susannah, but Ayckbourn thinks it will be funny to have Susannah’s constant worrying keep Delia awake.
The next happiest couple are the youngest, Malcolm (Gordon Hecht) and Kate (Katherine Gauthier). They are situated in the middle bedroom on stage dominated by a futon backed by a wall which looks like its peeling wallpaper needs replacing. They have just moved in and are throwing a house-warming party to which Trevor and Susannah have been invited along with everyone they know. Malcolm and Kate are still in the early stages of love, chasing each other and playing childish tricks like hiding one another’s shoes under the bed.
Given that this couple are the central hosts of the play, it’s a pity that Ayckbourn has not given them much personality. All we really know is that Malcolm likes to work with his hands (without much success) and Kate tends to be rather giddy. Hecht decides to make Malcolm a sturdy but not especially interesting person while Gauthier doesn’t seem to know what to do with Kate. Gauthier gives us the impression that Kate was a former cheerleader, though that hardly suits the British setting. Hecht is best when showing Malcolm’s simmering anger when Trevor and Susannah ruin their party. Gauthier is best with the few snide remarks she’s given. Otherwise, when she shouts she loses all vocal control and her words are lost. The scenes between them are flawed in the play’s second half when Ayckbourn decided that Malcolm will start to put together an IKEA-like piece of furniture at about midnight when Kate is trying to sleep. The situation simply doesn’t ring true.
It’s difficult to know exactly what kind of character McCooeye thinks he is playing. Is he supposed to be a stuffy older man or is he supposed to be a young man who has just become stuffy earlier than usual? McCooeye has a great chance to show off his skill at physical comedy when Nick’s book falls of the bed and Nick tries to retrieve it. Unfortunately, Dykstra has McCooeye go through all sorts of bizarre contortions in trying to reach the book, most of which are totally inconsistent with Nick’s back injury such as bending completely backward over the side of the bed. Implausibility dampens laughter. Driscoll might be amusing if she could avoid the constant nasal whine that characterizes everything she says.
Trevor and Susannah are the couple all the other couples are worried about because the two are on the verge of a break-up. Both are completely self-obsessed and assume that everyone else is as fascinated by their marital difficulties as they are. Pederson, in his Soulpepper debut, is known to be a fine comic actor. He has acted with the National Theatre of the World and was hilarious in Stewart Lemoine’s play Pith! last year. Here the humour of his self-involved character just doesn’t come across.
Matysio, who happens also to have played in Pith! and has shown a fine knack for subtle comedy, also fails to find the comedy in Susannah. The most obvious reason is that Dykstra has allowed her to play the role as if it were Hedda Gabler. Susannah has a self-help mantra she says to boost her sense of self-worth, but Matysio intones it as if it were some sort of ancient wisdom. We should see instead that Susannah is relying on clichéd pop psychology slogans that could easily appear on a poster in a kitchen wall of the period. Ayckbourn is, after all, writing about the people who would later be called the “Me Generation”.
The joke of the play’s title is that, unlike what one might expect, there is no sex at all. In a good production of this play the prime source of humour should be Ayckbourn’s portrayal of the utter self-absorption of Trevor and Susannah. It’s not strange they are not getting on. They are far too alike. The second source of humour should be the way that the neuroses of Trevor and Susannah begin to infect the three happy couples on stage and leave them in a far less secure state than when the play began. Dykstra attempts to mine the former source for humour but does not succeed. As a result he totally misses the second source.
I attended the play on a Wednesday matinee where the audience received it with fitful and muted laughter. This seems to be totally appropriate since the play was only fitfully amusing and neither the director nor the cast, save Koslo, fully mined what modicum of genuine comedy Ayckbourn had created.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Amy Matysio and Ron Pederson; Gordon Hecht, Katherine Gauthier, Amy Matysio and Ron Pederson. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2015-05-16
Bedroom Farce