Review by Richard Lord

For the Stage Club, Singapore’s oldest extant theatre company, this season’s black was Black Comedy. But the usual connotations of that term do not apply to the show the Stage Club served up most recently.

This Black Comedy is a deliciously clever tour-de-force by Peter Shaffer. Shaffer was part of that stampede of talented playwrights who made the London theatre such an exciting place in the 1960’s. (Though Shaffer’s own theatrical career was launched two years before the Swinging Sixties swung in, with the widely acclaimed Five Finger Exercise.) He is most famous for dark, serious dramas like Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun, but also showed himself a deft hand at comedies such as this one.

But even in a light-relief piece such as Black Comedy, the young Shaffer was primed to flaunt his skills as a dramatist. Here Shaffer hauled out the tired old workhorse of the theatrical farce and revitalised it by turning basic theatrical rules and conventions inside-out.

The most basic of theatrical rules is, simply, that the audience should be able to see. But this play starts out in total darkness. We in the audience hear two of the central characters talking (mainly exposition, as it happens) and planning how they are going to make this a perfect evening that will put the final seal on their engagement to be married. These two characters, as we overhear, are struggling sculptor Brindsley Miller and his middle-class fiancée Carol Melkett.

Suddenly, the lights come on and we see the actors staring out in bewilderment. Within moments, we learn that in that world up there on the stage, the lights have just gone out. There’s been a power failure in Brindsley’s building and most of the next, very entertaining hour will be spent with those two and a small parade of other characters caught in the dark, leaving us, the audience, the only ones who can see what’s going on.

The half-dozen characters who join the pair to share the darkness are like a thin cross-section of 1960’s English society. In arranging this assembly, Shaffer was able to squeeze in one of his signature themes: the clash of cultures and how that clash can be both beneficial and destructive.

In this case, Brindsley himself has a fairly working class background, though he has pursued a very un-working class profession (as least for British lads) — sculptor. Also, he has decided to marry up.

Carol is not too far up, however; she comes from an endangered section of the middle-class: her father is a life-long military men, now retired, known to friend and foe alike as “the Colonel”. As the action unfolds, Brindsley dreads meeting this “monster father” because he may not consider the young artist “a suitable candidate for husbandry”. To make this meeting more pleasant and increase his chances of daddy’s approval, Brindsley has “borrowed” some furniture and artefacts from a neighbour, an art and antiques dealer, who has conveniently gone away for the weekend.

When he arrives, the Colonel quickly fulfils Brin’s dire expectations. He comes on strong and readily offers his judgement about the young man’s sculptures: they would make good garden implements. As it happens, Brindsley is also expecting a visit from a well-known and eccentric art collector, the painfully wealthy German Georg Bamberger. Bamberger also happens to be extremely hard of hearing, which adds an extra comic dimension to the loss of vision everyone suffers from the blackout.

But the young struggling sculptor also gets a number of unexpected visitors on this evening (as so often happens in farce). One is his neighbour Miss Furnival, the repressed, teetotalling daughter of a Methodist clergyman. The next to arrive — not only unexpected but very unwanted — is Harold Goringer, the art collector whose own flat (also now in total darkness, of course) has been emptied by Brin and Carol — without Harold’s knowledge or permission.

Even more unexpected and more unwelcome (at first) is the lovely Clea, whom Brin keeps speaking of as a former girlfriend. As it turns out, Clea is not all that former, and her arrival threatens to scuttle Brin’s engagement to the well-heeled Carol.

Also turning up a little later are the aforementioned Bamberger and Schuppanzigh, a master electrician who has come to get the power flowing again. And since Schuppanzigh is himself German, he is, of course, immediately taken to be the millionaire German art collector who can launch Brin’s career with a single over-priced purchase. Never has an electrician been so fawned over, but Schuppanzigh takes it to be British graciousness towards someone about to bring them back into the light.

The whole arrangement is too convenient for words, but in the logic of the farce, it is all rather likely, almost inevitable. Plus, having most of the play transpire in the supposed dark, Shaffer is able to make all the farcical elements rather believable and alive. For instance, any attempt to light a flame or pull out a flashlight to see in the dark has to be extinguished quickly by either Brin and Carol so that A) the all-too-trusting Harold won’t see that his furniture and precious art works are now adorning Brin’s flat and B) nobody else will see that Clea has arrived a bit later to resume her place in Brin’s life — and bedroom. To tangle the threads even more, we quickly learn that Harold is gay and has been long been harbouring hopes that there might be something mutual in his affections for the much younger Brindsley.

A good farce needs to be calculated almost as well as a good mystery, and Shaffer makes few stumbles as he carefully lets the many threads of this farce unwind. (Actually, there are many stumbles, but they are all intentional as the characters fumble their way in the dark.) Before long, we can sense that Brin and Carol are actually not meant for each other, and that the better match for this young sculptor is Clea, who shares his class background and passions. As everything crashes to a conclusion, things all work out more or less for the best, in the time-honoured tradition of farce.

The Stage Club, under the assured direction of Nick Perry, handled this difficult material quite admirably, though not flawlessly. Let’s start with the few negatives and work our way up into praise: Some of the physical jokes about the darkness could have been sharper. I’m thinking, for instance, of the segment where Brin hands Carol the phone, hits her with it and then gets himself tangled up in the line. A sequence like this has to seem as if it occurs naturally. If it comes off as something that’s been rehearsed, it is not nearly as funny. In this production, it was the latter.

But aside from such matters, the cast was quite up to their assignments. Nick Cheadle proved a lovable fool as Brindsley and managed to gave the part good contours that made the comedy even deeper. As fiancée Carol, Anna Vardy was also admirable, nicely shuffling together confusion, cunning and charm to give us a Carol that we rather like — up until the moment we switch our allegiances to Clea.

Barry Woolhead has in past Stage Club productions proven himself a deft hand at taking on British working-class types and making them winning elements in any show. Cast here as the Colonel, he showed that he could also handle upper-middle toffs quite effectively, though I would give the nod to his less stuffy creations.

As Harold, David Banham looks like a well-groomed, sartorially sedate version of Quentin Crisp. He delivered the character very well, combining a sense of hurt dignity and comedy. (I have seen this character portrayed as a flaming, effete über-aesthete who does not so much get laughs but instead gets laughed at. Banham gave us a quite sympathetic Harold, who was also quite funny through most of the action.)

The pleasantly repressed Miss Furnival came through nicely in the work of Mini Elliot. Elliott was both credible and humorous as she got progressively drunk during the events. (It goes without saying that Shaffer saw to it that Miss Furnival’s requested lemonade would get mixed up with a stiff alcoholic drink in the dark and that she would quaff said booze as if it were a soft drink.)

The most polished performance here came from Stephanie Fend as Clea. Fend looks like a cross between a young Diane Ladd and a young Michelle Pfeiffer, with a pinch of early Angelina Jolie thrown in. She used that face well, adding cheeky subtexts to all her moments on stage and was pitch-perfect in delivering her lines — even though she is apparently the only non-Briton in the cast.

However, Fend occasionally failed to convey that her character was moving about in total darkness. (Also, a number of things she does, like tapping the Colonel on the other side of his shoulder, would have been nearly impossible in total darkness. These moments show that she, and/or the director, were sometimes thinking outside the play.)

The two “Germans” in this show (Steve Clark as the cultured electrician and Russell Bennett as the wealthy art collector) came equipped with clunky stage-German accents: a grating Kraut-laut, as it were. Both characters were delivered ery broadly, bordering on caricature. But that was true to the script, as Peter Shaffer obviously took the least care in creating credible characters with these two “krauts”.

For a play like this, with its heavy insistence on visual humour, to work well, you need a strong stage crew and director Nick Perry and his cast were ably served by the Stage Club crew. Oh, and kudos to the prop department, which managed to turn up a BOAC flight bag. (BOAC was an airline that got merged into British Airways was back in 1974. The Stage Club props room must boast quite a hoard of wonderful theatrical antiques.)

As Black Comedy is just a long one-act (often paired with Shaffer’s White Lies, the dark comedy that was this play’s original companion piece), the Stage Club put up two other British comedies to fill out the evening. This pair of curtain-raisers were billed as “Light Tragedies”, but that billing was decidedly tongue-in-cheek; both would actually fit better into the category of comedies.

The first up was Alan Ayckbourn’s Countdown, which comes closest to fulfilling that billing of “light tragedy”. This is a poignant comedy charting one (and what we can assume is a typical) evening in a slow expiration of a marriage. To give you an idea of the emotional landscape on which this piece operates, it originally appeared in an evening of short plays called If Love Decay.

The nameless husband and wife are (as director Nick Perry himself aptly said in his director’s note) simply going through the motions of a marriage after twenty years of conjugal dry rot. The device that Ayckbourn uses to show us the emotional life of the couple is to have them moving in and out of internal monologues addressed to us (which the other spouse apparently can’t see or hear) and the forced conversation between the two.

Angela Barolsky and Simon Hardy both served up good turns as the couple, showing a fine command of the theatrical blue notes in the piece while still preserving its comic elements. Both were convincing as working-class Britons caught in the sad demise of spunk and desire.

Whereas Ayckbourn uses mainly a scalpel to dissect the marriage in Countdown, in Present Slaughter, Michael Green goes at his material with a cricket bat, swinging away joyously. This tasty tidbit is basically a parody of Noel Coward comedies. No, correct that: it is a parody of bad, overreaching productions of Coward’s sophisticated comedy. (The title is itself a play on one of Coward’s more successful plays, Present Laughter, even though the set-up is more along the lines of Coward’s most famous work, Private Lives.)

The short piece opens with the kind of poised Cowardly banter reminiscent of the opening scene in Private Lives. What we are witnessing is a talent-challenged production of this play within a play wherein Oliver and Lavinia, two upper-class Britons, meet at some ritzy Riviera resort. Formerly involved with each other, they are now married to two other people, but that’s just a minor speed bump along the fast lane to that hop into bed they seem destined to take before long. However, there is a major collision awaiting them - an accident that brings about rapid end to this performance.

From there, the play is just a chronicle of what happens as the performance slumps to an early end. The whole thing is very lightweight, if not indeed trivial, but very funny when handled properly — and the Stage Club does a fairly good job with it.

As Oliver, Roy Marsh came out looking like Count Dracula after a rather invasive botox session: it worked splendidly. The vampiric element underscored the story’s sudden detour when Oliver accidentally slashes his wrist on broken glass while clumsily trying to fix his leading lady a drink. One thing that was not deft in March’s performance was knocking into the drinks table and spilling everything onto the floor or across the table. There he looked like he was trying to look clumsy.

Other than that, Marsh delivered a fine, arch performance. Marsh seemed intent on twisting and wringing that famous theatre-world quip that “dying is easy; comedy is hard”. Ably assisted by Karen Askew, he squeezed some delicious comedy out of Oliver’s bleeding to death.

Askew as Lavinia hits all the right tones in her parody of an upper-class lady used to being pampered. The six-person supporting cast did also handled their parts nicely and made the central action come through clearly and comically.

In fact, this was one of the most solid productions I have seen the Stage Club mount in that there was not not a single weak performance anywhere, despite the large cast. Of course, some actors were clearly better than others, but everybody, down to the smallest walk-on in Present Slaughter, did at least a commendable job. The sum of the parts was a quite enjoyable whole that shows the high quality local amateur theatre scene is capable of serving up. In fact, this Stage Club production could teach a few lessons on pinpoint comedy to some productions put up by ostensible theatre professionals here in Singapore.