This was the last production I was involved in. I directed and starred as Cook - a senile old woman with cabin fever, anger management issues and a large meat cleaver.
This has long been one of my favourite stage plays. It's set in a nuclear shelter, 20 years after it may or may not have happened. Cook lives there with two older teenagers - Sir and Madam. They're brother and sister but don't really understand the concept. The new game it's strongly suggested they've invented for themselves is not the most appropriate. Whilst berating the youngsters for playing this new game, Cook lets slip about a door. She also tells them for the first time what became of their parents (Rissoles, with too much pepper and not enough salt).
The two decide they want to leave. All that stands between them and the exit is Cook and her mincing machine.
The use of language in this show is fabulous. The wordplay is witty enough to make the audience laugh even at the most tense of moments. The humour is about as dark is can get before it turns into something else entirely. It would be easy to play this as a flat out comedy, but I believe that would miss the point of the show entirely.
Despite her psychoses (and by god she has a lot of psychoses) Cook is actually (IMHO) a deeply sympathetic character. Her violence stems from her fear of the outside, quite possibly relating to an assault that occurred before they wound up in the shelter. She is obsessed with her sister Annie's husband, did something once happen between them, and if it did, was it consensual. The script hints but never answers those particular questions.
I've directed this show four times now, and played Cook in three of those. I've always played it as a drama and let the comic lines find their mark as they appear. If anything, the lines become funnier when the audience is recovering from the shock of Cooks temper at it's most violent. If Cook is played as a panto dame , all laughs and jollity, it wouldn't be possible to raise any tension towards the end when the meat cleaver reappears.
There are very few plays where the lines "Remember me when I'm a rissole" would make sense. And this is probably the only one. Surrealism menace and comedy rarely combine as fluently as they do in this play. The section of dialgue about what should they have for dinner (the usual) manages to answer possible audience questions without ever saying anything concrete about how they're still alove down there after so long. It's utter genius.
I really hope I get a chance to play this part again. And I really hope I can play it against a Sir and Madam as good as my companions on stage this time round. Their excellent performances really boosted mine.
From a tech viewpoint, this is a really easy play. Minimal set is required. A rocking chair and a bunk/camp bed of some description. A 50 year calendar is referenced, but I played it with the calendar on the fourth wall so we could dispense with that prop, and allowed me to deliver a couple of monologues directly to the audience. You can throw in whatever touches you want but you can get away with lights up at the start and lights down at the end with your own choice of sound effects.
An easy play to stage, one of the best scripts I've ever performed. This is an actor's dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment