Actor David Woods is playing a Frenchman, Victor, whom his wife Raymonde suspects is having an affair. He’s doubling in the same play as a prat-falling drunken porter, Poche, at the Snatch Time hotel in the eighth arrondissement of Paris.
Farce is descending upon Sydney Theatre Company. Mistaken identities and double takes. People appearing then quickly vanishing. A Flea in Her Ear, written by Georges Feydeau and first performed in 1907, is the elaborately silly penultimate play in what has been an emotionally exhausting year for the nation’s biggest state stage company.
In the rehearsal room, with a script freshly adapted by former company artistic director Andrew Upton, director Simon Phillips suggests Woods play Poche like a sewer rat. So Woods, one of an ensemble of nine actors, spends a whole day behaving like a toothy rodent.
Driving home that night, the actor sees a squashed rat on Sydney Harbour Bridge – and the sight fills him with dread.
The next day, Phillips recounts the rat omen over lunch with Upton and Guardian Australia at the theatre’s wharf bar at Walsh Bay, and the pair laugh with gusto. “David’s so fantastically eccentric,” says Phillips.
Upton, who recently relocated to the US with his actor wife Cate Blanchett and their children, has been busy in another rehearsal room, directing Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s excoriating examination of Hollywood studio executives.
The heart of the play is secretary Karen, a role originated by Madonna on Broadway in 1988, but played this time by Australian actor Rose Byrne. Mamet, whom Upton describes as an “extreme thinker”, has been reported as poised to direct a film version of the same play.
It’s been a funny old year for Sydney Theatre Company, given the dramatic premature departure of Upton’s successor as artistic director. The British-born Jonathan Church stepped down on May 26, just nine months after his appointment.
Five months later, with the role temporarily filled by Upton’s protege Kip Williams, there has been no announcement yet of who will fill the gig permanently.
There has however been speculation that the New Zealand-born Phillips – who also directed the Tim Finn musical Ladies in Black and the much-anticipated Muriel’s Wedding the Musical – may be in line to run the company.
Is he open to the idea? “No, thank you,” says Phillips, between mouthfuls of calamari.
“Damn!” jokes Upton.
“I love this company and I love working for it,” Phillips continues. “But I ran Melbourne Theatre Company for 11 years, which is a good five years longer than I intended to run it. I’m happy for someone else to [run Sydney Theatre Company]. Beautiful company, but it’s not for me.”
What about Kip Williams, whose darkly funny take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ended its season on 22 October? What are his chances of getting the permanent job?
“I think he’s a fantastic director,” says Phillips. “I shouldn’t really venture an opinion about casting that role in STC, but I love his work.”
Upton agrees: “Yeah, he’s a terrific director.”
But asked if there’s a sense of when an appointment will be announced, Upton and Phillips tip into the roles of absurd, clueless courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, plucked from Hamlet and dropped into a Tom Stoppard play.
“I think we’re both employees, aren’t we?” says Upton.
“Yeah!” says Phillips.
“I genuinely don’t know anything,” they each say, almost in unison.
Phillips’ love of farce binds him with Upton for A Flea in the Ear, which grew out of the French belle époque. Upton says farce was a reaction to “gritty, turgid” 19th century melodramas; the setting and era remains, but his adaptation ramps up the double takes and mistaken identities, and condenses the plot.
Feydeau was the “father of farce”, says Phillips. He has directed a previous adaptation of the play, and was keen to keep the performers in corseted period dress to maintain the humour of the elaborately choreographed hijinks. He names Fawlty Towers as the greatest contemporary piece of farcical writing.
“Farce is traditionally considered to be comedy of action, but Andrew’s sense of character in A Flea in Her Ear is so beautifully defined,” he says.
Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, meanwhile, has always been a comedy of character and clever wordplay: two Hollywood studio hucksters, Bobby Gould (Damon Herriman) and Charlie Fox (Lachy Hulme), bet that Bobby can have sex with temporary secretary Karen (Byrne) when she’s assigned to read a worthy movie script the men have no intention of producing.
Karen begins in act one as an ingenue, but by the second act becomes an agent of change. Although Karen has fewer lines than the men, it’s the hardest role to get right, says Upton. He cast her role first. “That’s something Rose [Byrne] has in spades: the ability to land on incredible truth and incredible daffiness.”
In Mamet’s book Bambi vs Godzilla he writes that the entry-level position at movie studios is a script reader, “nuzzling the earth for truffles for their master … neophytes get the two options pretty quickly – conform or die”.
Is Mamet’s view of Hollywood dead on?
“He’s quite an extreme thinker, David Mamet,” says Upton. “That’s where he draws his drama. So in Speed-the-Plow he’s set up a great tension between innocence and cynicism.”
The play had a big influence on Upton as a theatre writer.
Has Upton met Mamet? “Very briefly, about three years ago. He’s so focused. It was a very brief meeting.”
“Did the words ‘fuck off’ come into at all?” jokes Phillips. “As in, ‘Mr Mamet, I’ve always been so –’ ‘Fuck off!’”
Upton chuckles. “He was very nice, but very focused. You could feel he wouldn’t suffer fools, so I got out of there as fast I could.”
The pair belly laugh, like absurdist players in their own harbour-setting farce.
• A Flea in Her Ear opens on 5 November at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House. Speed-the-Plow opens at Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay on 14 November
