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A common complaint against reviewers and award ceremonies is the lack of recognition of the review team. But, in Peter Shaffer’s 1965 play, “all these” are stars.
Inspired by a lamp that the author saw in a Chinese theater, a light fixture in a south London room has a bright light to represent total darkness and vice versa. When the match is struck, the lights dim; the light bulb ignited the instant shutdown trigger. This conceit requires the actors to find an obscure way around one of the UK’s smallest parts, then wander around as if they can’t see each other as much as possible.
Lighting designer Elliot Griggs provides excellent non-conformist lighting, highlighting the work of John Nicholson, who is known as a “comedy consultant”. A standing slap involves one player fouling another while kneeling on a chair. Joe Bannister also, in a moment of nominal destiny, has to fall off the ladder.
He also manages the powerful breathing of the sculptor Brindsley Miller, who has to keep everyone in the dark so that the visitors won’t see that he has destroyed the furniture of his neighbor’s old antique dealer to please the art dealer. At the end, three of Miller’s closest friends are in the room, leading to misplaced whispers, touching and kissing.
Some may see the unexpected resonance of modernity in the fragility of the power of electricity but Black Comedy is a time piece, a conversation published by people remembering “bombs” (the second world war) but fearing “the Bomb” (the third world war). Things that could have been there are now a thing of the past, like Directory Inquiries phones and old fuse boxes. A historical detail – the presence of two German comedians – was changed by the hiring of the Munich-born director Caroline Steinbeis, who achieves the necessary, helpless laughter that is matched only by the theater and Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.
This Black Comedy encounter is Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Equus – both marking the 100th anniversary of the playwright’s birth – show Shaffer’s unusual transition from theological to the mystical. An interesting link is the use of the happy words of the father of the blind horse in the tragedy and the 60s debutante in the comedy, although, with the girl who refers to making love as “sexipoo” and her father as “Daddypoo”, Steinbeis wisely cut the dung suffix. In other words of change, the performance of the cleaning lady, originally written with the comic voice of Maggie Smith, was also well known as in the Caribbean with Patricia Allison, who – proving the rule of the theater that, in the game of everything that goes well, the extra can – successfully deal with the bad tea at the night of the press.
With Equus showing the author on his high horse and Black Comedy proving his power over a short distance (75 minutes), this is the most exciting 100 times for Shaffer.
