Fifteen seconds is the time it takes to deprive a new-born baby of oxygen and leave it with cerebral palsy. It is also the time it takes for a half-decent snog. In François Archambault's short comedy, the twentysomething Mathieu has endured the first, but never the second. Inwardly, he is a young man with regular lusts and desires; to the rest of the world, he is a figure to be pitied and admired, not someone to be loved.
He is played by Jamie Beddard with a great forlorn frown, dreamy eyes and a deadpan black humour that cleverly undercuts our expectations of the character and the actor's disability.
Enter Mathieu's better-looking brother Claude and his casual girlfriend Charlotte, add a touch of restless angst and the prospect of an alternative love match between Charlotte and Mathieu raises its head. She is in advertising and likes to observe how consumers buy goods for their packaging not for their contents. "It's not how a product is made that matters," she says. "It's how it's perceived." We spot the symbolism long before she does.
Archambault's play, first seen in Montreal in 1997 and translated here by playwright Isabel Wright, is light and breezy, dealing with a potentially fraught subject with cheery economy. He is let down, however, on two counts by Roxana Silbert's in-house production. The first is the staging in the Traverse's studio. Anthony MacIlwaine's set is a big wooden box of tricks with walls that slide across to reveal shopping aisles and art galleries, a floor that conceals sofas and fountains, and beds and breakfast tables that appear out of nowhere. All very ingenious, but quite against the deft spirit of the script, with set changes that are painfully disruptive to its easy rhythm.
The second is a colourless televisual style of acting that repeatedly threatens to suck away the energy. TV heart-throb Joe McFadden as Claude has good-looking charm but no hidden depths and, like Gabriel Quigley as Charlotte, tends to let his lines drift away inconsequentially. It is nothing disastrous, but it denies the play its proper punch.
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