May 1989

I got involved in a conversation recently about preferences for material. Did I prefer to appear in comedies, dramas, musicals or perhaps classicals or period pieces?

It occured to me then that some groups do make a mistake with the selection of material. There seems to be a preference for comedy and sure, one gets a better buzz out of a play that an audience responds to, as with laughter in a good comedy yet, the most difficult thing to do well has to be a comedy. Especially a comedy requiring any degree of timing. Yet I have noted some who seem to favour them.

Hams like me just love those laughs and will push for comedy all the time yet, in recent times, I ahve been more and more involved in and with more serious work and I have to confess to a much greater degree of satisfaction from this. I am in fact now of the opinion that good drama is much the easier to do than good comedy.

If you take a standard sort of three act comedy, there is an absolute demand by an audience to get them in the mood for laughter early in act one. If a play has a weak point, it had better be somewhere in act two and act three must make up for it. Failing this, audiences and critics alike will be very unforgiving.

It has been my experience on the other hand that with a good drama, murder mystery or even some of those real soapsies (TV is a great example), if the story line is good, little faults in the presentation will pass with little damage to the over all production. If the story brought a little tear to the eye, or raised the hair on hte back of the neck a little, or even made them a little angry then, these effects on emotions will be the most remembered effect that the performance will record with them. Far far more tolerable, I feel, than three acts of comedy with no laughs…………….JEF.