Reviewed by Paul Davies
November 2014
Cooney Farce (prepare well, with time, energy, enthusiasm and love)
Take a perfectly normal young couple, on a very important, nerve-wracking day. Add in a couple of wide-boy brothers, one with a van load of contraband and the other with a dissected cadaver.
Need more? Chuck in a couple of Albanian refugees, a domineering Scot, a traditional British bobby, and an East European gangster.
Add a carnivorous sofa-bed, a wheelbarrow, a window to exit by, a tuneless trumpet and gravity-defying underwear!
Ensure that you’re actors are all well-cast, well matched, talented, skilful, and well rehearsed,
Mix thoroughly. Serve to an appreciative audience to bouts of spontaneous applause at appropriate points of the performance.
If ever you’re producing a farce and you don’t have Ian Rigney directing you’re on at least your second choice. -And that’s probably true of further afield than Adelaide!
The big secret is pace of course. If your cast is weak anywhere just keep it fast. Pace is very forgiving. But when you cast well AND make it fast. -That’s when you’re going to have a winner! When you practice your business until it’s second nature, when you get an actor to learn to play the trumpet. When they learn Albanian and invented sign language. That’s when you set the benchmark and show that farce is an under-rated dish in the theatre recipe book.
Now what’s needed is for the lovely people at the Rep to ensure that productions of this caliber get the audiences that the effort and the quality deserve.
