It is the funny season and comedy is dominating most of our theatres. You cannot do better than taking yourself off to see comedian Alan Committie, back in full force with his latest one-man show Fully Committied!.
The conceit this time is a delightful spoof on those grim, often idiotic, PowerPoint presentations that business and government people subject one another to. We have pie charts dividing up the subject matter of the show into percentages, and graphs indexing our enjoyment against our need to pee.
With wry commentary Committie also shares a slide presentation of his childhood. Particularly rewarding is his analysis of Dan Brown’s alleged authorial skills.
The theme is commitment in its various forms during our lives. Among the myriad of subjects covered are marriage, health, 2010, our technological revolution, and global warming. Why, he asks, is it lamely called ‘warming’, which sounds quite comforting, as opposed to imminent global ‘incineration’?
Committie has a talent for showing the funny side of the ordinary, for pointing out the absurd comedy of every day life. The jokes are witty and mostly well above the belt.
I was allowed to see the performance when it was still in previews, and Committie was already in very fine form with his new material. The show is cheerfully designed and once again well directed by the reliable Christopher Weare.
Share on Facebook
Sam Shepard wrote Cowboy Mouth (1971) with Patti Smith while they were having an affair during his prolific and manic early years in the East Village when he was part of the off-off Broadway scene. Shepard has described his one-act plays of this period as “impulsive chronicles”, “slightly embarrassing” with hindsight, but unapologetically churned out while “learning how to write”.
Surprising then that despite it being belaboured with private symbolism for Shepard and Smith, how enduring is its energy, and how easily each subsequent generation identifies with this angst-ridden, graffiti script and its discombobulated protagonists. This time around, it speaks thanks to good performances, but mostly to Christopher Weare’s lucid and coherent design and direction.
In the twilight zone of a detritus ridden room, Slim (Nicholas Pauling at his best), a downtrodden, volatile, would-be rock star, oscillates between worshipping and cursing his mistress and co-habitant Cavale (Tinarie Van Wyk Loots), an ugly duckling outpatient from a mental asylum with a club foot and a crow for a pet. Their frustrated aspiration for fame and fortune and their failure to find messianic redemption through rock ’n roll or some mythic figure such as Jim Morrison’s Lizard King, inevitably prefigures the calamity of their relationship.
Philosophically flimsy and intellectually unsatisfying, the play nevertheless succeeds with sinuous dialogue and poetry as powerful as the disembodied imagery of its title (borrowed from Bob Dylan). The project continues for each successive generation to create a God in their image.
Share on Facebook
The Mechanicals, an invigorated, new repertory company, have launched their season of British plays with a quality production of Steven Berkoff’s misanthropic, 1981 satire, Decadence.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Berkoff’s relatively well-known (I can recall at least two hit local productions, and there is a 1994 cult film starring Joan Collins and Berkoff himself) savage lampooning of the British ruling class might have dated. Certainly the profanity and the obscenity amuse more than shock. Yet given the brink of disaster global capitalism has brought the world, the play has a new life, for Berkoff is poetically anatomising here the rapacious mentality that motivated the spawn of Thatcher (or ‘Maggot Scratcher’ as Berkoff named her), the consequences of whose behaviour we live with today. As Thatcher infamously put it: “There is no such thing as society”.
Precisely mannered and brilliantly choreographed by director Christopher Weare, Scott Sparrow and Emily Child play two couples, the cockney Sibyl and Les, and the upper class Steve and Helen. Divided by the class structure, they ironically nonetheless mirror each other in their avarice and pornographic egomania.
Sparrow, a graduate of the school of Buckland, has the right physicality for Berkoff’s highly stylized mode of theatre, and he copes well with the upper class glottis. Child is more at her ease as Sibyl, but triumphs in that fail-safe scene, the fox hunt as sadomasochistic sex. It truly is as Wilde said, ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’.
Share on Facebook
Photo: Daniel Galloway
It’s hard to imagine it happening anywhere other than at The Little Theatre. Where else would we have an opportunity to see a full-scale production of Tom Stoppard’s unapologetically intelligent (too many people would say ‘challenging’) comedy classic, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead?
First performed on the fringe at the Edinburgh Festival (1966), it deservedly made Stoppard as a playwright. Rosencrantz (Alan Committie) and Guildenstern (Rob van Vuuren), two specious minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are trapped in limbo, left dead but unresolved by Shakespeare. It’s a stratagem for Stoppard to examine fate and tragedy, irreverently from the inside, where Waiting for Godot meets Pirandello.
Christopher Weare’s ingenious stage design includes unreachable ladders, levitating chairs and a ramp that cuts through the auditorium. While the other actors disappear as if magically behind a double-door flat, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are always trapped on stage, even during interval.
Meticulous direction allows for some slapstick comedy without ever compromising on the witty and demanding script. Weare’s deft directorial hand is particularly evident in the choreographing of the strolling players’ fast-paced dumbshows, which provide many of the belly laughs, and a twelve-minute Hamlet that precedes each performance. Weare excels at these, having perfected these techniques in previous productions of Lovborg’s Women Considered.
A supporting cast of senior students perform with confidence as the tragedians. Veteran actor Neville Thomas leads them as The Player, a sort of eldritch Cheshire cat with just the right sinister measure. Van Vuuren is enthralling. Committie is superlative. Years of solo work have honed his comic timing to a fine art. Both actors demonstrate a thorough understanding of Stoppard’s erudite humour (duller wits find it gibberish), his rhetorical rhythms and achieve the kind of effortless repartee essential to the comedy. They have found the perfect director in Weare.
Unlike Guildenstern who never wins a toss, you can’t loose seeing this exceptional production.
Share on Facebook
