When Ken
Bevans, asks his wife Chris what she remembers saying to the guests
who have just arrived for Charley Brook's anniversary party, she replies,
"I was speaking so fast, I couldn't listen." While she may
not have caught what she had said herself, she and the rest of the cast
left the audience pricking up their ears for more witticisms delivered
at rapid speed.
Set in a finance minister's living room and featuring four upper-crust
couples faced with a scandal involving (gasp!) a bullet shot through
an earlobe and a missing wife, Neil Simon's play pokes fun at a whole
range of themes and issues from New Age healing methods to the inexplicable
fear of the police.
Simon's characters are delightfully self-centred. With the four couples'
being only concerned about issues which affect them, it is surprising
that Charley Brook, the poor earlobe-injured finance minister is still
alive at the end of the play. It's particularly surprising considering
that all the attempts to call a doctor to help him are foiled by the
couples' general unwillingness to be embroiled in a scandal that, if
made public, might threaten their jobs. The general unwillingness to
go straight on to the truth and the preference for cover-ups and deceit
only serves to reflect mankind's propensity to hide things from one
another, in a bid to save one's face, or arse - for all that matters.
In short, Rumours, despite its Bronx-born American playwright,
is a satire with universal relevance.
Act one opened with Ken Bevans (Steve Clark) and his ditzy blonde wife,
Chris (Nicola Perry), whom we later discover has a weakness for a drink.
Put them together and a simple act of ending a phone call that may potentially
publicise the scandal, results in Chris' revealing more than she intended,
to the amusement of the audience. Nicola Perry did a great job in blending
both physical and verbal humour and in addition, executed the most convincing
and intentional trip-and-fall I had ever seen. I could hardly believe
she has a day job. Similarly, Steve Clark had the audience in stitches
with his loss of hearing at the end of the first act (due to an unfortunate
incident where, he says, a bottle of shaving cream exploded). And his
slightly recovered but still selective hearing at the beginning of the
second act provoked even more laughs as he spelled out to the couples
exactly what had happened, not knowing that just a few moments ago,
when he was still deaf, they had already been told everything.
The rest of the cast demonstrated almost impeccable comic timing with
the bulk of the laughs going to the roles of Chris Bevans and Leonard
Cummings (Steve Armstrong). Armstrong's restrained portrayal of Leonard
coupled with his rigid body language brings back memories of actor John
Cleese in Fawlty Towers. And celebrity cook, Cookie Cusack's
(Angela Barolsky) makeup and Russian frock made her the epitome of all
that Martha Stewart is not. And even though her spinal injury and likeness
to a manicured poodle seemed to be calculated to draw cheap laughs from
a very kind audience, Barolsky managed to bring out an additional human
dimension that accentuated her performance and changed ridicule into
pity. Barry Woolhead, who appeared in the Stage Club's original version
of Rumours seven years ago, reprised his role as Officer Conklin.
He and Officer Casey (Sally Anderson) were so convincing as policemen
that the audience visibly strained their ears in order to hear the commands
given by the headquarters through their walkie-talkie, only to realise
in dismay that the barely audible commands were in fact gibberish. Not
unexpectedly, this discovery drew laughs too.
But like most productions, there were a couple of boo boos too. Firstly,
even though the delivery from the actors was clear for most of the time,
I found it quite hard to catch parts of Claire Cummings' (Kim Maxwell)
dialogue (especially in the beginning when she first appears). And I
was not the only person who suffered slightly from this; the obvious
lack of laughs from the back of the theatre and the concentration of
laughs from the first few rows indicated that Maxwell's delivery was
too rapid to carry. Secondly, Frankie Ng, who played the role of Glenn
Cooper, appeared strangely disconnected from his character at times,
but thankfully he managed to redeem himself in the second half of the
play. One could perhaps speculate that the fear of getting into trouble
and being identified by the police is deeply rooted in all true-blue
Singaporeans' hearts, which would neatly explain why his performance
in the second half, when the police finally appear, was so enjoyable.
Nick Perry's direction was well paced and this proved to be a relief,
because the play lasted for more than two hours and would have bored
the audience stiff with poor direction. The use of Mack the Knife
as the opening song set the mood for the action yet to come -
but it was quite curious that Blue Moon was chosen to open
the second act. Blue Moon would have been perfect if the second
act was entirely about love and reconciliation, but that wasn't the
case. Setwise, the placing of the cellar door at the very centre of
the stage, obvious to every one, but yet ignored throughout the play
by the actors provided a very satisfying twist at the end.
As farce, Rumours satisfied all expectations of the genre.
Not only was the audience treated with humour of despair and a sense
of the ridiculous (bullet through an earlobe?), but there were also
frantic bouts of covering up loopholes and torrential storms in teacups,
courtesy of Barolsky and the painfully neurotic Cassie Cooper (Emilie
Oehlers) who demands unfailing fidelity from her husband.
As mentioned earlier, Neil Simon's Rumours is delightfully
written. The constant rapid-fire dialogue, word play and the occasional
breakdown of communication demand clear articulation and a precise sense
of comic timing on the part of the actors, whom I am pleased to report,
largely did justice to the script. Additionally, The Stage Club, which
has been known to feature a clash of accents in some of its other productions,
emerges relatively unscathed in Rumours. This is not surprising,
for director Nick Perry did mention that staging the British edition
of Rumours "relieves the majority of the cast from having
to try desperately to anchor their accents somewhere in America."
In the non-British minority, Ng's accent was believable and not jarring
when placed beside those of the British actors, and Oehlers did a perfect
job.
So apart from some minor quibbles with regards to acting and the lingering
question: why Blue Moon? what better way is there to end a
busy week than to end it with a healthy dose of laughter?
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"The cast demonstrated almost impeccable comic timing"
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