Thursday 8 August 2013

Fringe 2013 - Day 4

Bottome's Dream (Embrace Theatre, SK)

Bottome's Dream is more ambitious than any Fringe show has a right to be - which makes it all the more impressive how well the play succeeds. It is in the league of Two Corpses Go Dancing: a play which defies the conventions of its medium by aiming for the spectacular, and hits all the right notes along the way.

     A Shakespearean production with a cast of seven: it's not hard to figure out that Charlie Peters is the only person in Saskatoon who could possibly have pulled this performance together. I can only marvel at the masochism which leads him to tackle these challenges, but I can't deny the results. Bottome's Dream is a fantastic piece of theatre which should appeal to both hard-core Bardists and playhouse newcomers.

     This play delivers both a skilful reimagining of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and a fun slice of justice for all those of us who have sat through a bad romantic comedy, wishing the bland leads would disappear and the movie could be about the quirky supporting characters. Peters does just that; he takes Midsummer and removes what the pedantic and tedious among us might call "the main plot". Instead, it focuses entirely on the "rude mechanicals" mounting their own production of  Pyramus and Thisbe for the court of Theseus, and the goings-on of the Faerie kingdom. Whether it is a virtue of Charlie or an aspersion on Will, the play doesn't feel like it is missing anything.

     If you're in need of a refresher, the plot follows four members of the working class in Athens who get the idea to perform a romantic tragedy for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. But while they rehearse in the forest they end up treading into the crossfire of a feud between the faerie king Oberon and his queen Titania. Oberon hatches a scheme to teach his wife a lesson by slipping her a love potion and having her fall for a man with a donkey's head. But first he needs to find a man and transform his head into a donkey's, and that is where our dashing leading man Bottom finds himself unfortunately entangled.

     Of all the vile slanders that have been hurled at Charlie Peters over the years, no one has ever accused him of not getting Shakespeare. He reaches deep into the intestines of the play and pulls out those little icons that most people don't think about. The question of why so much of Midsummer is dedicated to these day-labourers putting on a very bad production of a tragedy is a valid one which Professor Kumaran never gave much airtime in my Shakespeare class. It's a two-pronged satire. One, it seems the Bard was taking a potshot at slapdash country performances, but also poking fun at censorship, reflected in Bottom's concerns about offending the ladies in the audience. Peters builds up the satirical elements with the absolutely ludicrous performance depicted onstage, but he adds another level. The would-be players in this play are so earnest in their efforts, even as we watch them cobble together what barely amounts to a middle-school level production, we can't help but admire the tenacity of the rude mechanicals and their endearing dedication to performing theatre, even if they don't understand it. I think there may be a bit of self deprecation here.

     Casting two of the players as females injects some welcome sexual tension into the mix. Emma Thorpe as the put-upon Snout, rejected as female lead, is adorable. She displays unfailing good intention but a general lack of grace and intellect; her sunny facial expression and sweet innocence evokes sympathy from the audience as she is frequently put down. Chris Donlevy as Flute (playing Thisbe) has a natural gift for Shakespearean dialogue, but in this particular instance his main strength is his capacity for slapstick, with potentially dangerous flailing and a lot of quick facial expressions; plus, his woman voice while playing Thisbe is really something else. Donovan Scheirer is larger than life as Bottom, the unfortunate man who finds himself with the head of an ass (though not displeased about having a faerie queen all into him). His cockiness and bravado owns the stage, and his wide-eyed bewilderment at why everyone runs from him post-transformation creates a brilliant comedic contrast. With his expression he always makes the dialogue land. Kate Herriot is Quince, the feisty director who nevertheless has a schoolgirl crush on Bottom. I can't overstate just how endearing she is, from her general tough girl persona to her tearful lament of Bottom's disappearance to her fiery commitment to putting on theatre whatever the cost.

     Local theatre staples Matt Josdal and Cheryl Jack do double-duty as Oberon and Titania and Theseus and Hippolyta. They had trouble injecting vitality into the lengthy monologues the faerie couple exchanges toward the beginning of the play, but as it went on their emotions bloomed and they really dug into the petty bickering and eventual reconciliation between them. Plus, their experience in the field really helps lend them the booming dominance needed for playing the immortals. Then as Theseus and Hippolyta they got to kick back and have fun by spending the final scene cracking jokes about the play the artisans are putting on; the ease of their conversation helped to set the atmosphere.

     And as much as it seems absurd to choose a stand-out element in this production, Elizabeth Nepjuk as Puck takes it. I have not really seen her act before (her previous major role was in the version of Into the Woods that I didn't see), but she was captivating the moment she came out onstage. I was immediately struck by someone who would be just as comfortable in Vaudeville as on HBO. Her embodiment of the character was amazing, with her light-footed physicality bouncing her around the stage like a sprite. If ever there is a dull moment onstage, one only needs to find her and her facial expression will be radiating 1500 Watts from wherever she is.

     And now it occurs to me that I haven't done nearly enough to describe how eye-wateringly gut-tighteningly funny Bottome's Dream is. Every line from the Shakespearean text which could possibly be considered funny is cranked up to 11. It's a testament both to the understanding of the play and the phenomenal chemistry of the cast. Then the final scene, the climactic performance of the tragedy, is a melange of slapstick, dry wit, and half a dozen other types of comedy I don't even have a name for into one spectacular explosion of hilarity. There are not many things in this world that have made me laugh quite that much.

     And because everything else in this play wasn't complicated enough, Peters also incorporated live sound effects (remember what I said about the masochism?). The actors make full use of their talents by operating a number of instruments to make the whole symphony of sound effects offstage, and sometimes onstage. I spent quite a while trying to figure out where this strange trumpeting sound was coming from, then I discovered it was coming from Kate Herriot's lips.

     This is a play that gets everything right, and possibly even gets a few things it didn't even think of right by accident. On one hand, it won't knock Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan off its pedestal, but on the other hand, that's a really fucking stupid observation to make. This is one of those shows that transcends the Fringe; transcends Shakespeare, if I may be so bold, because after this I don't think I could sit through a proper performance of Midsummer again.

     Best of the Fringe? Yes. Best of all Fringes? ... No, that's still Two Corpses Go Dancing, but that's another discussion. The point is, Bottome's Dream is one of those things you just have to see. Seriously. See it.


OK, that last review was a bit exhausting. This one will be short.

Unpossible! (Travis Bernhardt, BC)

One day in the not too distant future, the human race will discover that sorcerers have been living among us. And we will wonder how they could brazenly flaunt their abilities right in front of us for so long without us being any the wiser. Travis Bernhardt is one such wizard.

     Unpossible! begins much in the way you would expect from a magic show. There are fancy tablecloths, a deck of cards, some audience volunteers. It starts off simple. Oh, yeah, that trick is pretty obvious. Oh, well he just did that while I wasn't looking. But I was looking. Wasn't I? Oh, there's clearly a trap door in the top of that table. Oh, that's easy. He just taps the deck of cards and then ... I don't know. He might have done something with magnets on that one. I think I saw it go up his sleeve, but I'm not sure what sort of gravity manipulation was required to get it up there. OK, how the fuck did that deck of cards get in his pocket? It was in his opposite hand literally one second ago. IT'S UNDER THE GLASS OF WATER??? HE DIDN'T EVEN GO NEAR THERE!

     But Travis Bernhardt isn't just a magician; he's also a gifted comedian. He charms his audience, using self-depreciation to lull us into a false sense of security before blind-siding us with something crazy. He also strikes me as a man of science, caring not just about the ostentatious display of magic but also of the subtle math behind it. It makes me think that manipulating numbers is as much part of his act as manipulating objects. And manipulating people - that's a whole other story.

     A word of warning: Unpossible! requires patience. It starts out as a typical magic show, but the middle section of it gets quite strange. It focuses on audience volunteers doing things that don't make a lot of sense and which seem to be going wrong a lot. But keep focused, because all will be revealed in the end. The final moments of the show will make you utter a "Whoa" worthy of Keanu Reeves.

     Because the truth is, it's not a show of magic tricks. It's just one magic trick.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

Fringe 2013 - Day 3

Hot Thespian Action (Hot Thespian Action, MB)

I admit it, I was intrigued by the title, and their scandalously tasteful posters.

     Hot Thespian Action is a sketch comedy troupe out of Winnipeg, where people desperately need something to laugh about (just kidding ;)). Sketch comedy is a delicate art, plagued by a culture of "hit or miss". But when preparing a Fringe show and not a weekly TV program, we can afford our auteurs the time to really focus their energy and craft the best show possible. As such, HTA delivers a raucous 55 minutes of non-stop comedy mayhem.

     There is a touch of classic SNL in here, but it is definitely born of a modern age. One standout sketch, "W.H.A.A.T.T.H.E." tackles the problem of people over 50 who can't use any of their technology. Maybe it's a bit of a cheap shot, but it's hilarious, and more than slightly relateable. The sketches they have are diverse.  Some are high concept, like a woman who gets transported into her own purse and faces the miscellaneae she left abandoned there. Others revolve around one gag which they absolutely nail, like three robot girls talking like Jersey Shore bitches in Stephen Hawking voices - a shallow concept, maybe, but also one of the funniest things I've ever experienced.

     Sometimes, though, it's not clear what kind of show they want to do. With some sketches they push the envelope a little bit, but with others they shy away from being too edgy when they could have benefited from it. HTA is at its best when not falling back on stereotypes. A game show titled "Is He Gay?" is funny, but feels a bit 90s. Not that there is anything mean-spirited about it, it felt slightly off-putting.

     The five cast members have great chemistry with one another (they have to, judging by their posters), and they nail their scenes with excellent timing and a combination of whacky personalities and charismatic straight characters. There is nothing particularly deep I can read into this one, but it delivers what it promises: a one hour comedy extravaganza. Definitely worth seeing unless you hate happiness.

Tales from the Twilight (Erik de Waal, South Africa)

In four years at the Saskatoon Fringe I had never seen an Erik de Waal show, even though he'd been a major icon of the festival throughout that time. When I saw that this year he was performing a collection of horror stories along with his usual folktales, I saw it as time to correct my mistake.

     He begins the show by launching straight into a retelling of Poe's "The Telltale Heart". The first minute or so I was confused until I realised what the story was. When that concluded he properly introduced himself. He continued with a traditional South African (but really Irish) ghost story, then into a North American traditional by way of Mark Twain, and finally into a retelling of "The Monkey's Paw". Interspersed between these were snippets of his own childhood growing up in a haunted house. These small anecdotes capture the real essence of the horror story. I have no idea if they were completely made up, embellished, or stone cold truth. And it doesn't matter. It is what it is and it makes a good story.

     What I had to remind myself is that de Waal is a storyteller and not a storymaker. He has a tremendous gift for storytelling, working the timbre of his voice like an orchestra to excite the audience and build suspense. He alters his physicality to embody the character; this is particularly noticeable during "The Telltale Heart" when his creeping, slippery movements build a nightmarish aura around him, in contrast with protestations about how sane he is. At times de Waal steps down from the stage and walks through the audience, drifting in and out, applying subtle pressure to those audience members he moves past while the drama builds. One complaint I had was his frequent repetition of certain phrases, with the same accompanying gestural movement. It's a technique that probably works better with the African Folktales audience than it does here. But that issue aside, the man has a great talent for building atmosphere using only his voice and movements.

     It was disappointing for me that half the show was dedicated to telling stories I already knew, but de Waal is about the telling, not the making. And in that respect, he does exceedingly well.

Fringe 2013 - Day 2

The Shape of a Girl (Chrysalis Theatre, SK)

The title is evocative. Part cute, part suggestive, possibly something you’d see in an advertising campaign. It takes a while to swing back to the intended meaning of the phrase: that peculiar and endlessly troubling circumstance when someone can lose her humanity at so young an age, to commit such terrible acts, all while maintaining the shape of a girl.

     The new Chrysalis Theatre production for this summer’s Fringe tackles Joan MacLeod’s acclaimed script about the grim realities of bullying. It is inspired by the 1997 case of a 14-year-old Victoria girl who was beaten and killed by two classmates while many others stood by and watched. Those present made a pact of silence, but still rumours got out. The Shape of a Girl was born out of that incident but has only gained relevance since then, with the Amanda Todd and Rehtaeah Parsons cases keeping discussion in the air about the cruelty of young people.

     This play takes a fictional story of a small Vancouver Island community where a seemingly ordinary group of girls find themselves twisted by a long-running game of malice, denigration, and passive witness. The one-woman show focuses on the story of Braidie, handmaiden to the Devil, in a sense. She recounts how her innocent childhood was transformed by social hierarchy and needless ostracism, how her best friend Adrianne became queen and arbitrator of her circle of classmates, pronouncing judgement as she saw fit and delighting in cruelty towards those she decreed were deserving of it. She recounts how one girl named Sophie, who never did anything wrong, became scorned and hated by everyone who knew her, simply because it was decided that she should be. And finally she recounts how she herself stood by and let it all happen, time and time again.

     U of S alumna Danielle Spilchen, in her first solo show, takes us on a profound and shocking emotional journey. Her ageless eyes shift seamlessly between hyperactive girlish enthusiasm and shell-shocked horror. She has a face which can shine halogen-bright or darken to a sullen smouldering, and throughout the course of the play she explores the whole range of expressions. The performance is a bit frenetic, unstuck in time, bouncing from one point to another, swirling around points of violence, then, as if approaching a black hole, it slows to a moment, a pause between heartbeats. Like the arresting bell sound effect that rang periodically, never failing to jolt me in my seat, Spilchen has the ability to snatch the audience out of one state and put them in another. She moulds the emotional experience, offering brief moments of levity then barrelling back into anguish.

     Onstage she is accompanied only by two stepladders. They stand grey and monolithic, one of them towering over her, the other much smaller. Before a single word is uttered, there is a power imbalance onstage, one ladder looking down on the other and Braidie wavering between them. At times she tries to climb, but there is always a painful sight when she does. The play is framed as a letter to her estranged brother, which lends a sense of longing and displacement to Braidie’s words. The sense of loneliness in her social circle becomes more pronounced as the play reaches to a close and Braidie becomes more vulnerable. Danielle Spilchen maintains such a degree of emotional availability that in her final tearful breakdown, it really is difficult to tell if she’s still acting.

     The one complaint I would lodge against the production is that it finishes with the director Louise Seidel offering a ten minute “talk-back” with the audience. I could tell that she planned this in anticipation of there being a lot of young people in the audience, and I grant that it may be a good way to temper their reaction to the dark resonance of the play. But in my predominantly adult audience, it came across as shallow, and all too reminiscent of those tired, pointless seminars I had to sit through in elementary school. The schoolyard saccharine approach Seidel took in contrast with the blunt reality of the play made me imagine ending Letter’s from the Apocalypse by addressing the audience and telling them to by energy efficient lightbulbs.

     The Shape of a Girl is an emotionally trying but very rewarding play, with an electrifying performance by Danielle Spilchen. It is not my custom to assign numerical ratings to plays, so I will just use words. Must see.


Money Don’t Grow on Trees (Neverending Highway Productions, SK)

Choose Your Own Adventure. I remember those books. I usually ended up getting eaten by a monster a couple times. I still used to marvel at their complexity, though. But I, along with six billion other people in the world, never imagined that the genre could be transplanted into live theatre. Fortunately, I am privileged above most of those six billion in that I know Graham Kent and have access to his machinations.

     Our homegrown Neverending Highway Productions, which last year tried out a radio drama, is venturing further into the fringes (get it?) of theatrical culture to try out something totally new. And so we have Money Don’t Grow on Trees, a ludicrous crime and caper story about lost love, lost money, and the bank robbery that brings it all together. The play is framed by a teenage girl, Penny, working on a creative writing assignment, but she sometimes needs help from the audience to decide which direction to take the story. The story she crafts is about down-on-his-luck low-life Frankie who conscripts his reformed friend Cid into pulling off one last heist, but it doesn’t take long for things to go off the rails.

     Even removed from the CYOA aspect, the play works well as a raucous comedy. Penny continually intrudes upon the narrative to puzzle over problems and assign characters catchphrases. The dynamic between Penny and her creations is a lovely tongue-and-cheek bit of meta-fiction. Grahame Kent is outstanding in his frantic, off-the-wall Frankie, combining slapstick humour with some Guy Ritchie-esque dark comedy; there is great chemistry between him and his straight man in Morgan Murray. Danielle Roy is a scene-stealer, their industry professional with a suitcase full of sexual tension. She is fun but steely. She has a commanding presence which allows her to bat around her co-stars. Jalisa Gonie as Penny is fun and always keeps the energy up. Then Lauren Younghusband as the ambiguously gendered Terry brings a wicked deadpan delivery to the latter half of the play.

     It is to Money’s credit that the script seems to have had a solid outline before the participatory elements were layered in, rather than relying on the gimmick to prop up everything else. It has a lot of strength as a comedy, and the CYOA element gives it a boost of uniqueness. But since the play committed to that form and made it the focus of its campaign, I have to admit it felt a little anemic. There is only one choice offered to the audience in the entire first half, and that only ends up affecting a single line of dialogue. While I can’t speak confidently based on my single viewing, I am left with the impression that most choices presented to the audience have very little bearing on the development of the plot; and on top of that, there is a tendency to have one option be so outrageous it is impossible for the audience not to pick it. But the play does have four guaranteed possible endings, and I’m confident the three I didn’t see are just as manic and action-packed as the one I did.

     Money Don’t Grow on Trees is a wicked and wacky crime comedy. While its choose-your-own-adventure format could have definitely been more ambitious, the play still stands strong on its own.


Stalled (Watermelon Heart Theatre, SK)

Poetry and bathrooms. Two things that bring unlikely people together. Stalled drops us into a unisex bathroom (*gasp*) at an unnamed seedy bar. Regulars at a weekly poetry night, dropping into the lavatory for a few moments, get tangled up in the intimate bits of each other’s lives, pushing together and pulling apart.

     To glance at this play on paper, one curious thing that stands out is the scope of its cast. Due to the brevity of commode interactions, Stalled relies on a parade of characters moving in and out to keep the action going. With a cast of four, each person onstage does duty as three or four characters. Costumes are minimal, but each character has some sort of detail or accessory to identify them; beyond that it’s down to good old fashioned acting and faith in the audience to keep everything straight. (For the most part it’s easy, though I admit I got turned around a couple times.) The rogues gallery includes a cynical bartender and her easy-going manager, a fracturing husband and wife, a grieving father and son, lesbian best friends, a few insecure romantics, a wounded nymphomaniac, and a predatory academic. As they bump and grind against each other’s lives they take the time to scrawl graffiti on the bathroom mirror, which becomes a poem itself.

     At its heart, Stalled appears to be a love letter to poetry – not surprising given playwright Shanda Stefanson’s regular presence at Lydia’s “Tonight It’s Poetry” (making the timing of this play all the more poignant). But that is hardly sufficient as a summation of the nature of this play. It traces the preposterous origins of poetry, weaving its way through our lives and relationships, bursting out at moments of high emotional intensity. The line scrawled at the end of each brief scene creates an icon, defining the character who wrote it at that particular moment, but shrouded in mystery as soon as the moment passes.

     The production is fairly complex for a fringe show. Two graffiti’d bathroom stalls stand prominently centre stage. It’s an impressive feat both to create those and to move them on and off stage with ease. The sleazy, dilapidated look about them, along with their incongruous sense of sturdiness, set the atmosphere right away. The set doesn’t lack for personality, but it is also strangely impassive, shielding the audience from the sight of sex, death, and everything in between. The interactive graffiti is captured by a projector off stage left, which starts out blank and gradually fills up with poetic scribbles, changing the colour of marker depending on the act of the play. It was a lovely technique (thankfully free of technical glitches) that bounces back the whole theme: we start out with a blank slate, seeing nothing but strangers; over time we get to see their dirty secrets and vulnerable moments, inundated with information, but never quite able to make complete sense of it.

     The cast of four has quite a lot to juggle, doing lightning fast character transitions. It’s tough, but they do well, falling into the erratic pace of the production gracefully. Some of the cast has less acting experience behind them, so there were a few rocky moments where the actor had trouble getting grounded in their character. But they still hit the notes they need to. Alyssa Bennett is enigmatic as ever, playing a more subtle game than the other actors, but that makes her outbursts all the more compelling, in her brief lesbian makeout scene and her bizarre “Preserve your sexy” rant. Isaac Bond is at his best as the suave and slightly cocky manager. He brings a lot of emotion to the part of a depressed teenager, but in the spare few minutes he has to develop the character, there is a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t quite land. Mike de Jong (who, to the best of my knowledge, is not Jared Beattie) has a bit of trouble getting his characters to resonate and ends up overshadowed by his stage partners much of the time; but he does have a good standout performance in his meatiest character, a cardigan-wearing lothario who, by the end, could make the audience burst out laughing without saying a word. Kelly McTaggart was a surprise for me. I have not seen her before but she does a knockout performance as the play’s most mysterious character, an emotionally damaged woman who tries and fails to seek solace in casual sexual encounters. Her final scene is gut-wrenching.


     Stalled manages to keep a lot of balls in the air at once. Its biggest drawback is being constrained to Fringe length; with another 15 or 20 minutes it could do a lot of wonderful things and avoid spiralling its storylines toward their tragic endings too quickly. But as it is, it packs a lot into its 55 minute runtime. The actors turn out at least one great performance each, but more importantly they can all work well together. The threads of people, poetry, and that likeliest of all unlikely meeting places wind together to create a powerful thematic statement that you don’t even realise is there, like graffiti on the wall.

Fringe 2013 - Day 1

And we're back, more or less. This blog hit a crisis a few months ago and never quite recovered. But if anything was going to kick me back into gear, it was going to be reviewing 11 plays in 9 days. Unfortunately, I've had a bit of a time getting my reviews to catch up to the Fringing I've been doing, so I'm coming in under the wire. "Day 1" in this case is actually last Thursday. Day 2 will be up within the hour. Day 3 this afternoon.

And now, without further ado,

Don't Panic (Dibley Theatre, SK)

     Do you notice how whenever someone says not to panic, it's always a situation where you should totally be panicking? Do you notice how when you have to tell someone else not to panic it's almost embarrassing because there's no reason for them to be panicking. Someone panics over something small and we say, "It's not the end of the world." But what if it really is the end of the world? Don't Panic blows this whole idea wide open.

     This inaugural Fringe show by Dibley Theatre Productions (a subsidiary of Amorous Waffles). Takes us to a dystopia. Everyone likes dystopias (except for the people living there, I guess). This particular dystopia happens some 20 years after a devastating war which left much of the world as a blasted wasteland. What remains is the shining Fatherland: an enclosed civilisation run by a seemingly omniscient figure called Father. Here, efficiency is valued above all else, and the society runs in such a way that clockwork would be fined for being too emotionally suggestive. One day, as a man and a woman await the beginning of their productive workdays, and unthinkable tragedy occurs: their bus is late. As they try to grapple with this horrific incident, they find that they must, fearfully and trepidatiously, talk to each other, and the results surprise them.

     Don't Panic starts out as an absurd (perhaps even absurdist) comedy. The first scene depends heavily on getting the point across to the audience what sort of world they have dropped into; it succeeds by the subtleties of the script and the expressions of its stars, Danielle Roy and Rohan Keenan. Talk of "collateral zones" and "The Department of Data" help to establish the kind of ruthlessly bureaucratic society it is, while the uneasy first words between the man and the woman make it clear just how staid and isolated they've become. Roy's look of terror and confusion when Keenan offers a meek "hello" sets the stage for everything that follows. The set is fairly involved for a Fringe show: bench, bus stop, emergency phone, and garbage can, all rigid and uniform, stamped with department names. The setpieces represent the dull immovability of the society, which becomes more pronounced as the characters become more active. Much of the humour in the early parts come from the moments between lines, when the two stars fumble around human interaction like a five-year-old trying to tie shoelaces.

     The script carries a tradition of sketch comedy, drawing from Monty Python, and a bit of classic SNL. The wacky comedy pulls some sharp satire of the insecurities of modern culture. We might laugh at the panic that sets in on our characters when the bus doesn't show up, but anyone who has had their internet go down can surely relate.

     The play reaches the point where a comedy sketch would reasonably wind down, but then it keeps going. The comedy ramps up as the characters move from panic to desperation to hopelessness, but then it turns darker, the satire graver. We delve further into the truth of this society. As the man and woman shed their fastidious outer layers, they are revealed to be tragic and vulnerable. Instead of laughing at the absurdity of their situation we eventually turn inward and start considering their questions for ourselves, like whether freedom from worry is worth sacrificing freedom of choice. Seeing their cogs break down raises the question of what cogs we trust completely in our regular lives.

     As with any two-hander, the success of the play is contingent on the chemistry of its two actors. Keenan is the slightly bumbling but good-hearted archivist who carries around a few subversive thoughts in his head that he has never had the chance to share before now. Roy is the shrewd and firm risk analyst with unyielding faith in the system until it breaks in front of her. The two grow, transform, entwine, and fracture repeatedly throughout the play. They connect impeccably, bouncing off each other with incredible energy. The script is almost as demanding as the Fatherland, requiring spot-on comedic timing and profound emotional availability. The actors make good with both. Keenan spends most of his stage time being vulnerable, always staying present with his stage partner. Roy steals the final scene with a performance that brings the audience to tears.

     And I can't forget about the music. From the oppressive semi-futurist pseudo-Jazz that plays over the first couple scenes (because it's Father's favourite song) to the Cold War retro songs by the Inkspots (which will be familiar to any Fallout fans in the audience), it creates an off-balanced feeling of yearning for a bygone era that is only getting further away.

     There are a lot of elements that make Don't Panic work. Just like in the Fatherland, if any of them had failed, it would have been a disaster, but none of them did. It was lively, hilarious, touching, and philosophical. If that's reason to panic, then go right ahead.

     Six out of five stars. WHAT NOW, CHARLTON?