Black Comedy: Mixes physical comedy and emotional cringe

Patricia Allison (Clea) - (Sam Taylor)

It’s 100 years since Peter Shaffer was born and 61 years since his short, frantic farce was premiered by the National Theatre at Chichester. Caroline Steinbeis’s revival is another example of the Orange Tree under Tom Littler mining both the British and the international canon of seldom-revived classics. It’s almost more interesting as a period piece than as a finely-crafted but absurd mix of physical comedy and emotional cringe.

We’re in a South Kensington flat in 1965, where bohemian artists and liberated girls are usurping a world of retired colonels and primly sermonising spinsters. Wartime immigrants are part of every tier of society and one character’s homosexuality is barely veiled. All of which is secondary, of course, to the central conceit, which is the reversal of the states of light and darkness.

The opening moments are played in pitch blackness; then there’s a power cut and bingo, the lights come on. The characters can’t see anything but we can see everything. When a match or lighter is lit the stage snaps into a shadowy twilight. We have to believe there’s no peripheral illumination from streetlights, and that more and more characters will arrive and then stay in the darkened room rather than go to the pub, but farce always requires a suspension of disbelief.

Brindsley (Joe Bannister) is the sculptor who has invited a millionaire European collector, Georg Bamberger, to look at his execrable pop-art assemblages: garden forks embedded in neon-painted mannequin heads – that sort of thing. He’s also invited his fiancée Carol’s father, a former military man, in order simultaneously to secure his blessing for their marriage (here again we must suppress incredulity). Oh, and he’s “borrowed” smart furniture and ornaments from his absent neighbour Harold Gorringe, a fastidious northerner who owns a fine china shop, to make a better impression.

The company of Black Comedy at Orange Tree Theatre (Sam Taylor)

Well guess what – no sooner has the fateful fuse blown, and twittery Miss Furnival from upstairs sought sanctuary at Brindsley’s, than Harold comes unexpectedly back. In between blowing out illuminating flames from the colonel and Harold, Brindsley must sightlessly move the borrowed furniture back. Things aren’t helped when his ex-girlfriend Clea gatecrashes the sepulchral party, bent on erotic mischief. Or when the Weimer-born electrician is mistaken for the collector, who is known to be deaf. Cue much shouting.

There’s a slightly forced air to the desperation from the start in Steinbeis’s production. Brindsley, in particular, is one of those sweatily anxious twerps who only exist in comedies of the 60s and 70s. Leah Haile’s Carol is a yappy posh girl prone to the phrase “what’s laughingly known as…” and her father (Jason Barnett) a stolid caricature. Things improve with the arrival of Simon Manyonda’s prissy Harold and Patricia Allison’s Clea, the latter giving mischievous purpose to a role that has no emotional cohesion whatsoever.

Steinbeis does orchestrate the farcical chaos expertly in the Orange Tree’s in-the-round auditorium, particularly when the characters start breaking the fourth wall on all four sides. Chair legs perilously circle craniums and Brindsley crawls beneath the crotch of his putative father-in-law. The moment where characters try to guess whose hand they are holding recalls the confusion of the lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream, particularly when Brindsley finds himself blindly flirting with Harold. Bamberger could almost be a Godot figure, except that he actually turns up, only to pratfall through a trapdoor.

One could make exaggerated claims that the darkness here represents the subversion of the established order: the tradesman mistaken for the millionaire, the soldier made defenceless, romantic certainties overthrown, and so on. But really this is a somewhat dated farce, contrived with careful precision, executed with the sort of crowd-pleasing brio at which the Orange Tree excels. For the original 1965 staging, starring Derek Jacobi and Maggie Smith, it was paired with Strindberg’s psychodrama Miss Julie. The past really is a foreign country.

To 11 July, orangetreetheatre.co.uk