The Adelaide Repertory Theatre. The Arts Theatre. 21 Jun 2013
Middle-aged middle-managers, lost and fogbound on a Lake Districts island on a corporate team bonding exercise. The play is described as Lord of the Flies meets The Office - and that describes it well.
Where it is funny, it is very, very funny and, indeed, if one shuts one’s eyes while sitting in The Arts theatre during performance, the audience laughter rises and falls with such consistency that it could be canned and sold to a TV sitcom.
Director Michael Eustice writes in his program notes that he fell in love with this Tim Firth comedy 20 years ago but it took his subsequent experience in the corporate world to recognise the "underlying cruelty and bleakness of the play". It is this he has evoked with quite some power in this production. It's a very black comedy.
It has been given a simple set of painted trees on flats and a wet lake which is very effective albeit hard to see. A huge and magnificent log takes the focal point while Richard Parkhill's lighting brings twilight, sunset and the flash of fireworks which accompany the long night out of the stranded protagonists.
These characters represent the stereotypes of the corporate world all, in their way, classic examples of the Peter Principle. Neville, team captain, is the laid-back popular guy. He has bluffed his way to the top with positivity and he has confounded his team with his dubiously-placed self-conviction. With his ready chuckles, Paul Davies provides a personable embodiment of one who might be an idiot, but is a warm and likeable one. The waspish, spiteful, spoiled bully of the piece is Gordon. He has many of the funniest lines and he quickly becomes catalyst to the ensuing psychological interplay. He compensates for his own self-loathing by focusing obsessively on the weaknesses he finds in others, thus targeting Angus, the inadequate, whose wife has packed his backpack. Nigel Tripodi is such a good baddie that one comes utterly to loathe him as Gordon while Thorin Cupit develops Angus from wimp to champ with a perceptive and quietly powerful performance. Peter Smith makes a mighty meal of oddball Roy, the bird watching, prayer-mad man with a breakdown in his past. He seems so much to enjoy the character that everyone else does, too.
The production may stand strong on cast and set but it is the play which comes up short - well, long, as it happens. Between the vivid bursts of outrageous comedy, there are avoidable palls. The domineering character of Gordon was always intended to overwhelm, but it seems overwritten and one just wishes he would shut up. The play could do with a big blue pencil.
Samela Harris
When: 21 to 29 Jun
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
