November 14, 2011
Reality showAll the world’s a stage for the meta-theatrical antics of The Play’s the Thing
by NEIL BOYCE
November 10, 2011
Read the article on The Mirror website
Paul Hopkins, starring as Sandor, the master joker and strategist behind the convoluted plots of Ferenc Molnár’s The Play’s the Thing, opens the new Segal production with a sensible query, “How to begin a play?”
The Hungarian author’s 1924 work often gets compared to Pirandello in the carefree way it messes with dramatic convention. The play steps in and out of its theatrical frame, at times addressing the audience, tinkering with ideas of a character’s reality and identity. The adaptation of the work here, by English humorist P.G. Wodehouse, has a kind of Wildean veneer so peculiar to English parlour comedies, a languorous, “laying around on expensive-looking sofas while spouting epigrams” kind of inaction that presages the frantic activity to follow.
The telescoping play-within-a-play starts appropriately enough as dramatist partners Sandor and Mansky (James Kidnie), and their young composer Albert Adam (Chris Barillaro) prepare to stage an operetta.
They arrive at a castle getaway before the premiere to surprise the prima donna Ilona (Jessica Hill), who’s engaged to the composer. Having booked an adjacent suite to hers, they hear sounds of hanky panky through the thin walls. The devastated composer—who variously threatens to kill himself, his fiancée and tear up the score—seems inconsolable until Sandor contrives secretly to make him think that what they overheard was merely the rehearsal of a play.
It’s a clever and witty text, to be sure, but Molnár invests his stock characters with depth beyond their intended function as comic relief or obvious buffoonery. He makes the sort of timeless, confident observations about life, society and women that no one dares attempt any more. Sandor states that every time he contrives to pleasantly surprise a woman, “I was the one surprised! Women,” he concludes, “should never be surprised.” Replying to another character who explains that he meant well, Sandor replies, “Never mean well, it’s fatal.”
Kidnie is lovely as Mansky, the sensible, bewildered foil to Sandor’s machinations. Nattily dressed and with a monocle screwed into his round face, he looks like a cross between Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld and the playwright Molnár himself. A perfectly cast Chip Chuipka plays the dry-as-toast butler Dwornitschek, at the guests’ beck and call at any hour. “When do you sleep?” asks Sandor. “In the winter,” Dwornitschek flatly replies.
The meta-theatricality reaches its zenith just before the second intermission, as the trio ponder how hard it is to end the second act of a play, and actually try out several versions before the curtains finally close.
When Sandor has coerced Ilona and her alleged lover Almady (a brilliantly over-the-top Michael Rudder) into staging the faux play, it’s a hammy drama and histrionic shouting match they pretend is by a French playwright. Sandor saddles Almady with memorizing names of ridiculous length: French nobility with monikers like Tour d’argent de Saint Sulpice de la Grand Parmentière, enacting further revenge by making Almady’s character repeat that he’s “a ridiculous old petticoat chaser.”
It’s a tribute to Blair Williams’ smart direction—and Hopkins’ nimble characterization—that its two and a half hour running time sped by in a flash. A diverting confection as the days grow short.
THE PLAY’S THE THING TO NOV. 20 AT THE SEGAL CENTRE FOR PERFORMING ARTS (5170 CÔTE-STE.-CATHERINE) BOX OFFICE: (514) 739-7944, SEGALCENTRE.ORG