Peter Shaffer wrote three absolutely god-tier plays: Equus (which you can see in London right now), Amadeus (which you can see in London next year) and The Royal Hunt of the Sun (which teeters on being impossible to stage).
His other works tend to be relatively overshadowed, but probably the most fondly remembered of them is 1965’s Black Comedy, a throwaway one-act drawing room farce designed with astoundingly virtuosic precision, like a gaudy Christmas cracker that turns out to have a Fabergé egg inside.
The plot could scarcely be more boilerplate English farce if it tried (and to be fair Shaffer was trying for exactly that). In it, skint artist Brindsley Miller (Joe Bannister) tries to play off his ex, his fiancé, his neighbours, his fiancé’s dad and a guy from the electricity board as he frantically attempts to get his flat ready to impress a visiting German millionaire in the middle of a power cut.
Shaffer’s audacious innovation – you might call it a gimmick, albeit a bloody good one – is to reverse the lighting cues, so that when the lights in Brindsley’s flat are on, we’re plunged into total darkness, and when the lights are off, the theatre is brightly lit but the characters in the play can’t see anything. If it was significantly longer, it might run out of steam. But at one 90-minute act it’s damn near immaculate. It’s simply very funny to see a panicked Bridgsley attempt to drastically rearrange his flat in pitch darkness.
Of course there’s a limited amount a new production can actually do with it – it’s incredibly precise technically (you can hardly ditch the business with the lights) and it's effectively stuck in the ’60s unless you radically alter the script.
Still, director Caroline Steinbeis and her cast do a damn fine job making it do what it’s supposed to do, and they really work the Orange Tree’s intimate space. Special credit must presumably go to physical comedy consultant John Nicholson for the deftly controlled chaos and such delightful flourishes as the cast ‘mistaking’ members of the audience for characters in the play during the blackout scenes.
It’s a solid cast, too, even if they inevitably feel somewhat locked into the inflexible RP-spouting period farce roles assigned to them by the play – though with her dreads, tats and air of detached amusement, there’s something pleasingly disruptive about Patricia Allison’s late appearance as Clea, Brindsley’s not so out-of-the-picture ex.
Black Comedy is a very specific farce, and you can see why it only gets done every few decades. But what a treat that we’re living in one of them.
