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by Noel Coward, directed by Christopher Newton

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

July 11-October 31, 2009

"A Terrific Trio"

“Play, Orchestra, Play” is the title the Shaw Festival has given to the second instalment of its production of Noel Coward’s complete cycle ten one-act plays entitled “Tonight at 8:30”.  This one consists of “Red Peppers”, “Fumed Oak”, “Shadow Play”, all three of which premiered in Manchester in 1935, the last two, in fact, on the same evening.  This trio, in contrast to “Brief Encounters”, makes a thoroughly satisfying triple bill.  It helps that the three are more closely knit together in theme and are staged a smaller venue like the Royal George Theatre.  It also helps that they are expertly directed by Shaw Artistic Director Emeritus Christopher Newton.

“Red Peppers” takes its title from the stage name of song-and-dance duo George and Lily Pepper (Jay Turvey and Patty Jamieson), who are on the music hall circuit doing the same act that George’s grandparents did.  We see the Peppers on stage doing their routines and telling their corny jokes and watch them backstage sniping at each about bungled cues, complaining about the tempi of the drunken conductor Bert Bentley (Kyle Blair) and berating Mr. Edwards (Steven Sutcliffe) the unctuous manager of the hall, for the low quality of his establishment.  An air of nostalgia hangs over all these petty disputes which seem to have grown more rancorous because all the participants are aware that the form of entertainment they provide is dying out.  

Designer Cameron Porteous brings out the period detail in the hackneyed sets and overused costumes of the Peppers, and Jane Johanson provides them with purposely old-fashioned choreography.  Tyler Devine’s video design that lets us follow the Peppers through narrow passageways to their dressing-room has the paradoxical effect not of making their lives more immediate but presenting them as if part of a documentary.  

Turvey and Jamieson are perfectly matched, with Jamieson as a real live-wire who doesn’t know when to hold her tongue and Turvey as the one to tries to mitigate her rants until he perceives and outside threat and takes up her side.  Sutcliffe, expertly dressed and made-up to look like a middle-aged man vainly trying to give the impression of youth, is hilarious as the manager.  Wendy Thatcher has a marvellous cameo as the once-famous Mabel Grace, a West End “star” who now, for unknown reasons, plies her noble art in music halls.  

Newton maintains the atmosphere of a small provincial theatre by using two lovely ladies as “Presenters” (Saccha Dennis, Jacqueline Thair), who gracefully walk, sometimes sing, across the stage in flowing yellow gowns to post a placard announcing the title of each show before posing and disappearing into the side doors.  After the raucous close of “Red Peppers”, they duly effect a transition by covering the placards for that show the those of the next, “Fumed Oak”.

This is the least known of the three plays and in the present production turns out to be a real treat.  The title refers to the dingy style of furniture popular in 1930s respectable middle-class households but also suggests that the suburban life of compromise and complacency might leave some members of these households more fumed that the furniture.  The first half of the play shows us a typical breakfast in the Gow household.  Doris (Patty Jamieson), a motormouth of discontent, upbraids nonstop her aged mother (Wendy Thatcher), who pays rent to live there, and her own continually snivelling daughter Elsie (Robin Evan Willis).  When they can get a word in they snipe at her.  Meanwhile, the seemingly meek man of the house, Henry Gow (Steven Sutcliffe), dines silently and cringes at his family’s more egregious insults and reprimands.  In the second half of the play the tables are turned.  Henry has summoned up the courage to tell off his family and does with one surprising revelation after the next.  Sutcliffe brings off this venting of fifteen years of bottled-up rage brilliantly.  The others as the three generations of women in his life are all comically insufferable.

Newton sensibly places the intermission here.  What follows is “Shadow Play”, basically a one-act musical, that the Shaw last staged in 2001 as a lunch-time show.  Here we meet the evening’s third set of bickering couples, this time in the upper class, in the person of Simon and Victoria Gayforth (Steven Sutcliffe and Julie Martell).  The couple has just attended a Wend End musical and Victoria has a raging headache.  She wants nothing else but to sleep and takes three Amytal rather than her usual two.  Just at this inopportune moment Simon, who has been having an affair with Sibyl (Robin Evan Willis) wants to have a serious talk with her.  He asks for a divorce, but she can’t think properly as the drug takes over.  Soon memories of the musical mingle with her fondest memories of Simon as she plunges into unconsciousness.  

Coward’s bold experiment has lost none of its freshness and makes most contemporary musicals look stodgy by comparison.  Here Tyler Devine’s video design comes into its own.  Victoria’s projected bedroom wall wobbles like a pool's surface as she tries in vain to stay focussed on Simon’s words.  Eventually it dissolves entirely shading from background to background, sometimes with overlapping images, as Victoria’s dream follows its associative path.  It turns into moving images, especially effective for the scene in a train compartment or in a car driving through London.  Unlike many video designers, Devine’s images always enhance but never overwhelm a scene.  

In this piece Sutcliffe is very like a young Noel Coward in diction and in singing.  Martell is a very appealing Victoria.  In Johanson’s Astaire-inspired choreography the two dance beautifully together so that the dream does take on a healing function that Simon claims it does.  The high-level cast has Patty Jamieson (who played Victoria in 2001) as Victoria’s loyal friend Martha; Kyle Blair as Michael Doyle, the man Victoria has been encouraging in revenge for Sibyl; and Jay Turvey as Martha’s husband.  Melanie Phillipson shows poise as Victoria’s maid Lena and in fine voice leads the reprises of two of the show’s three main songs “Then” and “You Were There”.  The third song “Play, Orchestra, Play” gives the trio of one-acters its title.  

The three plays each featuring sparing couples each lead to different conclusions.  That in “Shadow Play” is the most ambiguous since it is hard to pinpoint exactly when Victoria’s overdose of Amytal affects her perception.  Simon claims she imagined his request for a divorce.  Or does the experience of witnessing Victoria’s intense, apparently vocal, dream about their first love cause him to change his mind?  It is a fascinating musical and precedes in its musical exploration of the subconscious Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark” (1941) by six years and Richard Rodgers’ “Oklahoma!” (1943) by eight.

Of the two instalments of “Tonight at 8:30” that have opened so far, “Play, Orchestra, Play” provides an ideal example of how Coward intended his collection of plays to work together as a variety of genres and as a variety of stories that gain in meaning through their propinquity.  This makes us look forward to the third instalment “Ways of the Heart” opening August 1 and the orphaned “Star Chamber” opening July 11.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Patty Jamieson and Jay Turvey in Red Peppers. ©David Cooper.