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Foolish Acts finds Terence Gilbert (Kelly), Adrian Bennet (Vere-Jones) and Ronny McGuire (Henwood), the three ageing actors who co-founded Courtenay Theatre in Wellington 40 years ago, reunited at the same theatre to do a play specially commissioned from New Zealand's most popular comedy playwright, Phillip Leighton (Ken Blackburn). To the dismay of the financially challenged commissioning company which is banking on Leighton to get them out of the red yet again, the populist playwright has grabbed the opportunity to write the tragic drama he has always known was in him. His great ambition is to write a play that becomes a set text and is translated into many languages. Strangely, his model seems to be a maligned Anton Chekhov, who actually wrote social documentary comedies that satirised the middle classes (as does Roger Hall, at his best). Leighton's Do Not Go Gentle finds an ageing thespian dying in a hospice, tended by a Russian nurse with a secret and a doctor who once performed in a Chekhov play at med school, and visited by an old colleague who now stars in a popular TV series. The melodramatic resolution involves the sort of revelation Oscar Wilde and W S Gilbert used over a century ago to comic effect. Leighton concedes Do Not Go Gentle is rubbish and comes up with a worse farcical rewrite called Revenge of the Killer Thespians, which envisions a cunning plan by which the dying patient can avenge himself murderously on a once (or twice) vituperative critic. It involves corn and ham sandwiches, silly wigs, classic farce gags and a multiple-identity ending redolent of Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. |
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