The Real Soulpepper Theatre

One thing I learned last Saturday is that playwrights Peter and Anthony Shaffer are identical twin brothers. How cool is that? (And also, how much would it suck when your professional artistic rival is the guy to whom you’ve been compared all your life? Peter Shaffer is most famous for Amadeus, the play in which the mediocre composer Salieri watches enviously as the brilliant but repulsive Mozart rises to the top. Anthony Shaffer is most famous for Sleuth, the play in which two playwrights plot to murder each other over a sure-fire-hit script that one of them has written. Hmmm…. ;) )

Anyhow, where I learned this was in the programme notes for Soulpepper Theatre’s double bill of The Real Inspector Hound (by Tom Stoppard) and Black Comedy (by the aforementioned Peter Shaffer). Both plays are comedies, although Black Comedy is a rather typical farce, and The Real Inspector Hound does that Stoppard thing where the part of the play that’s fictional and the part of the play that’s real life get mixed up, but, to tell the truth, both rather pale to their authors’ other works.

First on the bill was The Real Inspector Hound, a meta-send-up of every play Agatha Christie ever wrote and every play written by someone who wanted to be the next Agatha Christie. Moon and Birdboot, two theatre critics with problems of their own (Moon is neuroticly obsessed with being only the second-string critic; Birdboot is always having affairs with actresses), watch a horrible murder mystery play and wind up getting involved in the action. Naturally, The Real Inspector Hound also sends up critics, because what artist could resist making fun of the people who find all the faults in his or her work?

One of the things that makes The Real Inspector Hound difficult to stage is that there isn’t really a plot, except if you count the philosophical question of “can Moon and Birdboot justify the meaning of their dreary lives?”. Stoppard is witty enough that the audience doesn’t really notice there’s nothing going on, but the absence of interpersonal conflict does mean he often resorts to one of his favourite tricks: writing a section of dialogue where each character is actually ranting to himself without paying attention to the other.

(Made-up example:
BILL: I really hate those people who stand by the doors on the subway train.
FRED: Do you ever wonder if everyone sees the same colours?
BILL: It’s like, hello! I’m trying to get on, here!
FRED: Like, what if each of us perceives an entirely different universe?
BILL: There’s plenty of room in the middle of the car – why don’t you go there?
FRED: Maybe not everyone shares the same perception of time and space.
BILL: I don’t care what we don’t share – they should still be able to see there’s an empty spot further in.
FRED: What?
BILL: What?)

While this can be fun to read* and is nearly always more entertaining than two long monologues, it’s really difficult to pull off live. Each actor has to figure out why he or she would leave off at the end of one cue and convey it to the audience earnestly enough for us to forget that his or her clear reason for ending is because the script says so.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like it when characters talk at cross-purposes, because, hey, let’s face it: in real life, people often don’t listen to each other and they often misunderstand one another. But they often talk over and drown out each other as well, and when you get rid of that part of the realism, it can just sound wrong. Making a talk-at-cross-purposes sound natural** is, IMO, one mark of a virtuoso performer, and while the actors at Soulpepper are all top-notch, neither Michael Simpson nor Oliver Dennis (who played Birdboot and Moon, respectively) quite pulled it off.

Everyone else in the audience seemed to find The Real Inspector Hound much funnier than I did: it never made me laugh aloud, while the people around me were cackling. I’m familiar with typical country-house murder mysteries – I’ve seen the Mousetrap, read almost everything Agatha Christie has ever written, and even written my own play making fun of the genre – and I guess the Soulpepper send-up just didn’t strike enough true notes for me. There were a couple hilarious gags (including one where the characters tell each other to “listen – the [wheelchair-ridden character] is coming downstairs”, and we hear, “crash, crash, crash, crash, crash… pause… crash, crash, crash, crash”), but nothing that really tickled my funny bone.

Also, I have to admit, as brilliant as Tom Stoppard is, I’m kind of sick of plays making fun of critics. They’re such an easy target (“anyone who can do, does; anyone who can’t, critiques”), and most take the low road of “arguing” that thinking about something automatically makes it less fun; or that, because they don’t like to think about what they write, nobody else should, either.

Black Comedy strays out of the realm of both parody and satire into full-fledged farce, and it’s somewhat more successful. It’s almost pure physical humour, and so it doesn’t matter that the characters aren’t exactly three-dimensional. Penniless sculptor Brinsley is preparing for the simultaneous visits of his fiancee’s father and an extremely rich German art dealer. Wishing to impress them both, he “borrows” his fastidious neighbour’s antique furniture, secure under the impression that said neighbour will not be home for another couple days.

Because this is a farce, there isn’t really a question as to whether Brinsley’s charades will succeed: of course he’ll be found out, and of course there will be hilarious consequences to his ridiculous scheme. The unique aspect of Black Comedy is its conceit: when the lights are on for the characters, they are off for the audience, and vice versa. So, when Brinsley blows a fuse near the beginning of the piece, plunging everything into “black-out”, we get to watch the characters bumble around the stage, acting as though they’re unable to see.

The plot is clearly engineered to make the most of this novelty; most of the stage time involves Brinsley or someone else having to move something somewhere or replace something in the dark without the other characters being aware, or having one character mistake another for someone else, or having a character walk in without the others being aware of his/her presence. Nevertheless, it’s very amusing, even if it does at times stretch the bounds of credulity. (Like, seriously, who steals their neighbour’s furniture? Who goes to elaborate lengths not to come clean about it? Who doesn’t have a flashlight somewhere in the house?)

One of the nice things about juxtaposing this play with the previous one is the way it showcases the actors’ versatility. Each of the cast from The Real Inspector Hound takes up new roles in Black Comedy, and some really shine. Oliver Dennis transforms from stodgy, perfectionist critic to effeminate, gossipy friend, and Sarah Wilson morphs from unworldly debutante to salacious ex-girlfriend. Also, although I usually hate stories where the tension comes from someone with a horrible social secret in imminent danger of being discovered, in this one, I didn’t mind so much, because Brinsley thoroughly deserves to have his plans come crashing down on his head.

Sometimes, in rehearsal, actors “decide” things about their characters or their characters’ relationships. Usually, this means that they’ve consciously added a detail that isn’t specified in the script or clarified something that the script leaves ambiguous; in Hamlet, for instance, the performers playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might “decide” that they’ve been best friends since they were children because their mothers were also friends, or the actress playing Gertrude might “decide” that she was in love with Claudius all along and married Old Hamlet only because her father forced her to.

Usually, these things get “decided” to help ground the performer in his or her character – it helps to have a specific idea of the sort of things this character does and has done. Like how some directors will ask their actors to agree on how their characters first met or figure out what happens to their characters in the minute or two before they enter onstage. This sort of stuff is very useful for hanging up the play, but, sometimes, “decisions” of this nature can feel jarring to an audience because the strings are still visible.

I felt this was the case a little in Black Comedy: one performer seemed to have adopted a decision of this nature while the rest of the cast ignored it. I got the impression that he’d decided his character had a particular past with one of the other characters, but the text didn’t really support it to the extreme he was playing it, and it felt weird because none of the other characters seemed to have a past extending anywhere outside the two or three lines they delivered on the subject. It felt like hearing one of your friends talk about how great friends they are with another, mutual friend, when you know that said mutual friend really could hardly be bothered to care about who your friend is and would probably have to be reminded of their name.

In any case, both plays have complementary faults and virtues: Black Comedy is funny, but The Real Inspector Hound is witty; Black Comedy is implausible, but The Real Inspector Hound transcends implausibility with absurdity. Both are at times amusing and at others dull; both leave the slight sense that the play was just missing that extra little oomph that makes it truly mean something. Soulpepper has a program whereby students can get tickets for $28, which is pretty good. So, if you have a little extra cash to burn and feel like seeing a play that won’t go on forever or try to preach at you, this double bill might be a good bet. But, otherwise, save it for the Fringe.

* In a good novel, characters can convincingly talk “at” each other with little problem because the novelist isn’t constrained by the fact that an audience can hear only one character at a time. When novel characters talk over each other, the reader can still “hear” both of them.

** One of the best performances of this kind that I’ve ever seen was Christopher Plummer as King Lear; even when you couldn’t really understand what he was saying in his rambling mad-speech, you never, ever doubted that Lear knew exactly what he meant by the whole thing and had very good reasons for stopping when he did.