BLACK COMEDY/THE BOWMANS. To 5 July.

Newbury.

THE BOWMANS and BLACK COMEDY
by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson by Peter Shaffer

Watermill Theatre To 5 July 2008.
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 July.

The Shaffer’s the one hitting the target.
Sometimes a playwright comes up with an inspired idea, needing only (only!) craftsmanlike dexterity of plotting and structure to make it into at least a minor classic. That happened for Peter Shaffer with this 75-minute comedy from 1965. The title’s its own joke. Though lightly sceptical about sixties fashion and society, this is nothing like the Black Comedies that were Jacobean tragedy as redefined by T S Eliot.

Blackness here is literal, the idea deriving from a scene in Peking Opera where characters, in full stage light, behave as though in pitch-dark (and, in Shaffer, vice-versa when the lights are out). It mixes thrills and comedy through close-shaves with swordplay – something shadowed here as furniture and sticks pass in close proximity to heads and limbs.

Orla O’Loughlin directs with high efficiency. The performances never quite reach through the sheen of sixties fashion and manners to be as hilariously pointed as some productions manage in the early shenanigans where impoverished young artist Brindsley and his Sloaney girlfriend attempt to replace the luxury furnishings they’ve ‘borrowed’ to impress an art-collector from camp neighbour Harold Gorringe (given a fine whine and set anger by Jamie Newall). Yet they are reliable and energetically comic. And O’Loughlin keeps the later part from seeming stodgy, as it can when the physical comedy quietens down to allow philosophically verbal moments.

Designer Fred Meller somehow fits a two-storey set on the Watermill’s compact stage, avoiding any cramped feel in a play that depends on space and moving furnishings. Only the need for a hinged loft-door to the bedroom, which has to be kept open, seems strained, making unlikely the supposed inaudibility between the two levels.

Originally designed for a double-bill with Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the play's coupled curiously here with an episode from a Tony Hancock TV series. The Bowmans are The Archers thinly veiled, Hancock being a mangel-wurzel yokel, killed-off owing to his fondness for ad-libs.

Though some fun’s had with studio paraphernalia, there’s little point in reviving a personality-comedy like Hancock without a devastating recreation of the comedian. That doesn’t even seem to be attempted here.

.Black Comedy
Bamberger: Will Barton.
Carol Melkett: Ellie Beaven.
Colonel Melkett: Robin Bowerman.
Brindsley Miller: Greg Haiste.
Harold Gorringe: Jamie Newall.
Schuppanzigh: David Peart.
Clea: Rachael Spence.
Miss Furnivall: Claire Vousden.

(The same cast perform The Bowmans.)

Director: Orla O’Loughlin.
Designer: Fred Meller.
Lighting: Philip Gladwell.

2008-07-07 23:57:02