Peter Shaffer was a playwright who knew a great idea when he saw one. The clash between talent (embodied by Mozart) and convention (Salieri) is the compelling conflict in his modern classic Amadeus. And while a terrible crime committed by a troubled teenager would in the hands of most playwrights lead to a work brimful of social commentary, in Shaffer’s Equus, currently revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory, it is the basis of a psychological thriller.
The big idea in his 1967 farce, however, is that his characters are plunged into darkness for most of the play’s 75 minutes even though the audience can see them perfectly well. To help us acclimatise to the concept the play opens in the opposite state: complete darkness for the audience while the characters can see.
In this pitch black, the play’s intricate exposition is established during the conversation between struggling artist Brindsley Miller (Joe Bannister) and his fiancée Carol (Leah Haile). We learn that a famously rich collector is coming over to Brindsley’s South Kensington flat to view and possibly buy his sculptures; that Carol has also invited her father Colonel Melkett (Jason Barnett) so that he can size up Brindsley as a future son-in-law; and most crucially of all that Brindsley’s furniture is so cheap and nasty, that to prevent the colonel from thinking Brindsley is unworthy of his daughter’s hand the couple have “borrowed” chairs, a table and a chaise lounge from Brindsley’s absent, violently possessive antique-collecting neighbour without his knowledge.
When a fuse blows (the apartment block’s not the neighbour’s, which happens later) the intricate set-up begins to play out like clockwork. It has to. With the neighbour’s unexpected return, Brindsley and Carol resolve to swap back all the furniture without anyone else present knowing.
As Brindsley sweatily carries out his plan, chair and table legs swing precariously past the noses of his unwanted guests who now include a second neighbour, Miss Furnival, who is an increasingly drunk teetotaller, and Harold, the neurotic furniture owner.
Director Caroline Steinbeis choreographs much of the mayhem with the skill of a Rome traffic cop.
Yet the ecstasy that farce can conjure with pinpoint timing of dialogue and action is never reached. The suspense of disbelief is made yet more difficult to uphold with face slaps that fail to convince, as does the arrival of Brindsley’s recent girlfriend Clea (Patricia Allison) who with a fruit bat’s preternatural talent for operating in the dark manipulates the situation for her own amusement. Although the big idea, inspired by a Chinese play the 29-year-old Shaffer saw in 1955, is not fully realised on stage here, the play interestingly resurrects class attitudes that are now all but extinct.
And with the arrival of the “little man” from the electricity board who it emerges is German-born and came to the UK as a refugee, something of Shaffer’s Jewishness is reflected too.
Black Comedy
Orange Tree Theatre
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