✭✭✩✩✩

by Georges Feydeau, adapted & directed by Morris Panych

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 16-October 7, 2007

"Vacancy"

It used to be that the Shaw Festival knew how to produce farces.  One remembers “One for the Pot” by Cooney and Hilton that played at the Shaw in 1985 and later at the Royal Alex in 1996.  But it has been a long time since then.  Feydeau’s “Something on the Side” was a disappointment in 2005, as was “Three Men on a Horse” in 2004 and “Passion, Poison and Petrifaction” in 1998.  Other companies have done no better.  Stratford’s production of Feydeau’s “A Fitting Confusion” in 1996 didn’t work and neither did Soulpepper’s attempt at Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear” in 2001.

This year the Shaw is presenting the premiere of Morris Panych’s adaptation of “L’Hôtel du Libre-Echange” (1894) by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallières under the title “Hotel Peccadillo”.  It would be more honest if the Shaw said that “Hotel Peccadillo” was a new play by Panych suggested by an idea of Feydeau, since as he did with his “adaptation” of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” for Soulpepper last year, Panych has basically chucked the original plot and dialogue and substituted his own.  All Panych’s version and the original now have in common is the introduction of several characters in Act 1 with some names retained, whom we meet again in various coupling in Acts 2 and 3 in a disreputable hotel, followed by an Act 4 where they try to explain to each other what happened.  In the original Pinglet and Paillardin are two friends working on a building project.  In Panych they are psychiatrist and patient.  In the original Paillardin’s wife seeks revenge on her inattentive husband.  In Panych it is Dr. Pinglet’s idea to seduce Paillardin’s wife.  With so many changes it can hardly be said to be the same play.  Panych even introduces the character of Feydeau himself (ignoring poor Desvallières) as a kind of narrator and commentator.  This isn’t such a bad idea in itself except that Panych used this trick before in his version “The Government Inspector” in which we discover at the end that Gogol has written himself into the play as the supposed title character.        

I don’t mind that Panych’s version is not set in 1894.  He happily refers to Viagra, serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, gluteal implants, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, Michel Foucault and the torture of Iraqi prisoners.  But why has designer Nancy Bryant clearly set the action in the 1960s before any of those ideas were known and why does the programme itself concentrate so heavily on the ‘60s?  Clearly, something radically changed between the version Panych planned to write and the one now in performance.

None of this would matter much if Panych’s version worked well on stage, but is does not.  His jokes are strictly hit and miss with misses far outnumbering the hits.  Panych sets up several potentially comic situations but doesn’t follow them through.  Why, when Dr. Pinglet dressed as a stewardess arrives at his secret rendezvous with Mme Paillardin, does she make no remark on his peculiar attire?  Why does no one in the finale notice that Dr. Pinglet is wearing women’s shoes and hose?  What is the point of introducing the pilot Mathieu and his three stewardesses since they have no influence on the action?  Why cast Ludmila as a chaperon to the stewardesses if we never see her in that function?  Why mention repeatedly that Mrs. Pinglet in having her husband followed by a young man and never once show this happen?  In Panych’s “Hotel” there is none of the escalation of errors compounding errors, people repeatedly being discovered with the wrong people at the wrong time, that makes farce funny.  The conclusion, like what has preceded it, is simply careless and sloppy.  Paillardin’s troubles with his wife are not solved.  Pinglet inexplicably has no reaction when he discovers his wife is having an affair or when his nephew runs off with the woman he told him to avoid.  It’s as if the show ends simply because two hours are up whether loose ends have been tied up or not.

Ken MacDonald is usually an inventive set designer, but in this case his design works against what little coherence Panych has given his story.  Using an extremely forced perspective MacDonald presents us with a corridor with five doors on each side, each drastically smaller than the next, with a sixth door just around the corner in front.  Panych’s best visual jokes involve having the cast deal with entrances or exits through the smallest doors as if the play were about MacDonald’s set.  It is true that French farces are famous for their multiple doors, but what Panych and MacDonald fail to recognize is that the humour in farce is precise and mechanical and that we the audience must know exactly who is behind every door when.  In total contravention of this rule, Panych treats the twelve doors as if they all opened into the same shared back space, so that we never know who is where when.  Actors repeatedly enter in one door only to exit from another.  Because of this, the central part of the play when lovers hunt for each other in various rooms is completely devoid of tension, excitement or sense. 

Despite working with a poor script and poor direction, some actors still make a good impression.  If it were not for Patrick Galligan’s performance as Dr. Pinglet, the whole show would fall apart.  His doctor’s vain attempts to appear cool when flustered are always funny and as are his attempts to explain his own and others’ bizarre actions with a logorrhea of psychological jargon.  Jeff Irving is painfully geeky as Pinglet’s nephew Maxime and Mike Nadajewski is sweetly innocent as a bellboy from the country surprised by the odd activities in a city hotel.  Panych could have made much more of both roles.  Trish Lindström has a fine comic turn as Pinglet’s hopelessly myopic secretary Victoire, who seeks to rival her employer in psychiatry, and Laurie Paton is hilariously cast against type as a hideously dowdy chaperon for Russian stewardesses with a shaky command of English. 

 

Sadly, under Panych’s direction, or lack thereof, the otherwise superb Shaw company give performances one might rather expect at amateur theatricals.  People like Benedict Campbell as Paillardin and Goldie Semple and Pinglet’s wife fall back on clichéd bluster.  David Leyshon as Pinglet’s friend Mathieu, Charlotte Gowdy as Paillardin’s wife and William Vickers as Inspector Boucard seem half asleep.  Lorne Kennedy in ghastly makeup as Feydeau intones the relentlessly unwitty lines Panych gives him with a would-be world-weariness that comes out simply as weariness. 

What should liven up the proceedings is the presence of a live six-piece band under Ryan deSouza, but Panych makes no use of their potential.  They merely accompany and no one on stage acknowledges their presence, an odd oversight since Panych is trying so desperately to be postmodern.  All in all, the two-hour sojourn at “Hotel Peccadillo” is two hours wasted. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Charlotte Gowdy and Patrick Galligan. ©David Cooper.