With his 1944 play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre coined the phrase, “hell is other people.” Director John P. Kelly’s version of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular seems to refine that famous line. Here, hell is five other people forced to make banter at an annual Christmas party.
But while that definition is narrower than Sartre’s, the material in Seven Thirty Productions’ opening night performance at the Gladstone Theatre went for the big and the broad.
Divided into three acts, the comedy takes place between 1972 and 1974. It focuses on three couples as they take turns opening their homes to one another on Christmas. Jane and Sidney Hopcroft (played by Melanie Karin and Stewart Matthews, respectively) lead off as the first hosts, young and eager to impress their guests. They’re followed by the depressed Eva Jackson (Michelle LeBlanc) and her unfaithful husband Geoffrey (David Whiteley), and then by the aristocratically dull Ronald Brewster-Wright (Tom Charlebois) and his often-drunk wife, Marion (Lori Jean Hodge).
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Absurd Person Singular Director: John P. Kelly |
As each act goes on, the cracks in each couple’s relationship begin to show, leading to suicide attempts, electrocutions, dog attacks and a surreally sinister game of musical dancing. Hardly holly-jolly stuff.
So it’s good that the cast clearly seemed to be enjoying themselves. The play was frequently at its best with as many actors onstage as possible. The second act proved especially memorable. With five of the six cast members packed into one kitchen, each player seemed to work individually, and yet everything came together like an elaborately choreographed whole.
Individually, each performer brought their own distinct elements to the characters. The Hopcrofts, especially, made for the most energetic pair of the night. Both Karin and Matthews zipped around the stage, easily conveying their characters’ anxiety in the early parts of the play before becoming more and more self-assured.
Karin proved extremely versatile, imbuing Jane’s voice with a cheery trill that managed to somehow stay winning despite a somewhat grating cockney accent. Frequently put upon in the first act, she rose to the occasion, clearly showing the strains of a housewife under pressure to impress her husband’s colleagues before finally resigning to sad defeat.
Matthews, meanwhile, shifted facial expressions expertly while striding about in big, sweeping motions. He effectively conveyed Sidney’s desperate need for acceptance from people he sees as above him. Indeed, the fact that both characters became a bit tiresome by the third act may be a sign that the two were even a bit too effective. When they were onstage, it sometimes became a bit hard to focus on the older characters.
As Eva, LeBlanc managed to wring humour from a woman completely worn down by her husband’s infidelity and her own mental illness. Her facial expressions made her character’s attempts to strangle herself with a laundry line go from pathetically, hopelessly sad to laughable and back again. Whiteley, also the set designer and the Gladstone’s season coordinator, made for a perfect straight man, playing Geoffrey as a self-absorbed cad too wrapped up in his own affairs to notice his wife trying to kill herself.
Hodge and Charlebois, meanwhile, acted as the more restrained of the couples. While each character still had their flaws, they didn’t demand the spotlight or make the play feel too crowded, instead shading in the background with some of the play’s slyest gags.
While Absurd Person Singular’s title references the individual, Seven Thirty’s production succeeded overall because its actors could work so well as a group.
Absurd Person Singular runs from March 6-23, 2013 at the Gladstone Theatre.