Gemma Carroll & Colin Kitchingman: old phones.
Theatre
Last century’s fear
by David Eggleton
Alarms and Excursions is not so much a play, more a collection of screwball scenarios lobbed into the air and hit for six. They show Michael Frayn, who excels both at the lucid exposition of heavyweight ideas and at madcap farce, combining his interests and giving us the lucid exposition of little moments of absurdity.
Alarms and Excursions is intended to be a chuckle-worthy antidote to the ever-so-perfect lifestyles promoted by TV ads: so instead of satisfaction there’s implosion, meltdown, entropy. Trouble is, nowadays TV commercials exploit the manic-panic mode so shrewdly that they make soft-soap satire like this seem redundant.
The first sketch, “Couples”, offers a married couple staying next to another married couple in identical hotel rooms. It’s the standard tourist experience, prepackaged to the point where blandness excites paranoia – or at least comical social anxiety. Zooming in, we witness grumbling backbiters and inadvertent eavesdroppers who end up with ears glued to the wall, hearing more than they bargained for.
Another sketch, “Alarms” demonstrates how an influx of labour-saving gadgets can engender a sense of powerlessness as the technology acquires a life of its own: a rogue corkscrew chomps into a dinner guest’s thumb while she’s attempting to open a bottle of wine; the show-off host, meanwhile, who cannot break a mutinous circuit of message-devices, runs in ever-decreasing circles before experiencing a pratfall in the dark.
Each situation is similarly slick and manic to the point of delirium. Each is also an instructive essay on peer pressure and the herd instinct. One couple – simpering with false modesty – are skewered on their own pretensions; another couple are the dinner guests from hell who stay on and on and on, and then offer to prepare breakfast.
Frayn’s interlocking playlets were first performed in 1998, but already they seem dated. People on random collision courses and at the mercy of machines have gained a more sobering dimension this side of Y2K. Plus the technophobia seems archaic; almost ancient history to the PlayStation generation.
Yet the cast do a brilliant job of knitting shopworn material together so that we do get transported to the comic heights by this quartet of posturing ninnies: the writhing Patrick Davies, the simmering Colin Kitchingman, the hapless Gemma Carroll and the rubber-faced Clare Adam.
ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS, by Michael Frayn; directed by Hilary Norris, Fortune Theatre, Dunedin (to October 29).
