LUCKY YOU. To 6 September.
Oxford.
LUCKY YOU
by Carl Hiaasen adapted by Matthew Francis and Denis Calandra.
Oxford Playhouse To 6 September 2008.
Mon-Thu; Sat 7.30pm Fri 8pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.
TICKETS: 01865 305305.
www.oxfordplayhouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 September.
Stage translation for the converted?
Fans of Carl Hiaasen, and others knowing this novel, may well love this show (expanded from the Edinburgh Fringe and possibly bound for future dates), being able to hear the author’s voice. Without which it seems, simply, excessive.
Yet everything’s immensely well done, the strong cast veering speedily between contrasting characters as Black Jolayne’s robbed of her multi-million winning Florida Lottery ticket by a couple of White trash no-goods for whom anything outside the narrow ghetto of their prejudices (including the United Nations) is the enemy.
They’ve won millions themselves but Bode’s not goin’ a make him and his partner share the jackpot. Jolayne’s no victim, neither, specially as she has an act of conservation lined-up for her winnings. Folks here, in fact, seem good or bad, sensible or silly, with redneck-like simplicity. And they end up rewarded or doomed with a consistency to satisfy Prismatic fiction.
So off she goes with newsman Tom Krone, whom she eventually learns to trust, and who gives up his job on a no-news newspaper, to recover her ticket. There are funny episodes as the pursuit speeds round Florida. Bode suffers from crabs (the sea-creatures, one at a time, till he gets shot of the last one); agent Moffatt has a neat line in disillusion alongside his FBI-style pose.
Other scenes are merely silly. Doubtless overt religiosity in the American south offers plenty to criticise, but here it’s hysterical in the wrong sense. Even an adulterous wife over-eggs the point the third time she tells us she’s a Christian woman. Maybe on the page this has a ferocity belied by the visual childishness here.
Around such scenes, luckily, the plot develops neatly as the refusenik victim and her journalist companion pursue villains stupid enough to leave clues like signposts to their trail.
Designer Leslie Travers makes everything look suitably colourful and awkward, with a fractured caravan fronted by unevenly spaced set-pieces and images on TV-sets spreadeagled around the stage. And director Matthew Francis knows how to keep up the pace. But the joke, and the point, seem made long before two hours are up.
Jolayne Lucks: Nicola Alexis.
Shiner/Champ: Josh Cohen.
Demencio/Moffatt: Geff Francis.
Trish/Katie: Alexandra Gilbreath.
Bode/Arthur: Corey Johnson.
Amber: Kristina Mitchell.
Chub/Sinclair: Paul Reynolds.
Tom Krome: Trevor White.
Director: Matthew Francis.
Designer: Leslie Travers.
Lighting: Tim Lutkin.
Sound: John Leonard.
Music/songs: Loudon Wainwright III.
Video: Jonathon Lyle.
Movement director: Tom Godwin.
Dialect coach: Tim Charrington.
Assistant director: Luc Mollinger.
2008-09-02 11:39:57