BLAIR WOYNARSKI
Arts Writer

If you’re sitting in the audience at the Greystone Theatre when Black Comedy opens, you might think that you’ve found yourself in the middle of an unfortunate technical malfunction. Rest assured, you haven’t. The first scene of the play does, indeed, take place in pitch black.

The latest offering from the Greystone Theatre is Peter Shaffer’s 1965 British farce Black Comedy. It revolves around Brindsley, a hapless young man desperate to impress his girlfriend’s military father, who ends up stuck with an eclectic group of people in his apartment during a power outage. Brindsley’s life falls apart around him as he has to conceal his mistress and stop his neighbour from discovering that he’s stolen all his furniture, all while fumbling around in darkness.

Here’s the catch: the play operates on a reverse-lighting scheme. The stage is in total darkness while characters go about their business like normal, but once the power goes out the stage will be brightly lit while the characters stumble around in the “dark.”

It’s a feat that took a lot of work to pull off. It required extensive rehearsal, said Nathan Howe, who stars as Brindsley. The actors rehearsed every scene in actual darkness, “just to get a feel for where the bodies are in the dark,” so that they could then replicate that behaviour when the stage is actually flooded with light. On the flip-side, they had to learn how to move confidently around in the dark during the scenes when the lights are supposed to be on.

The show is being directed by Julia Jamison, who put on last winter’s musical Assassins. She wanted to present a “goofy, silly, run romp” to balance out the more serious dramatic fare in the upcoming season. It’s a farce, she said, but a very intelligent one.

Language plays an important role. Being an English play, actors had to work on developing their own dialects. Jamison said that the language used is closely linked with the status of the characters, so instead of seven characters all sounding the same, each one has a specific accent, which affects the way they relate to each other.

Howe is familiar with accent work, having played an English character in last fall’s Trafford Tanzi, but this time he took a different avenue.

“[In Tanzi] I based it on Jason Statham, but this time I based it on David Beckham,” he said.

When putting on a play, there is always a push-pull effect between the director and the script, with the former often conveniently ignoring aspects of the latter. But with Black Comedy, Jamison said, “I decided to really trust the stage directions.” She said the script was “like a piece of music” in the way it fits together.

The wit of Shaffer’s script aside, it is still a very physical comedy. Slapstick, pratfalls and a whole range of physical buffoonery colour this play from beginning to end. Some parts got dangerous, said Jamison, which required a lot of good communication and help from Iain Rose, de facto stunt expert within the department. It involves a complex set which needs to sustain actors blindly running into it throughout the show.

“The set is like another character,” Jamison said.

One pivotal set piece is a statue of Buddha that sits at the centre of the action. It sits in juxtaposition with the self-absorbed nature of the characters, becoming an ironic symbol of the tenets of Buddhism, which are “blatantly abused” by the characters.

It is bound to be an unusual theatre experience for anyone, since the audience and the characters see things totally differently. With the first scene taking place in complete darkness, said Jamison, “it puts the audience in a very imaginative place.” From there, it creates a window into a world that no one gets to see clearly: darkness.

The reverse lighting concept has a comedic purpose, showcasing the ridiculous physical behaviours of people deprived of their sight (Howe said he tends to adopt the pose of a turtle.) However, it also allows the viewer a look at the secrets they try to keep out of sight.

The script is clever enough to appeal to theatre aficionados, but the comedy has something for everyone. At the play’s heart, said Jamison, it’s just “unapologetically fun.” According to Howe, “You have to laugh at least once.”

While perhaps not the most fun you can have with the lights off, Black Comedy is a hilarious ride that shouldn’t be missed.

Black Comedy opens at the Greystone Theatre on Oct. 6 to October 16. Tickets are $13 for students.

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image: Pete Yee