Black Comedy / The Real Inspector Hound runs Aug 20 to Sep 20. $34-$65. Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill, bldg 49. 416-866-8666. www.soulpepper.ca or www.youngcentre.ca.
As part of this summer’s repertory company at Soulpepper, actor Mike Shara has had the rare pleasure of preparing three considerably different, classic comedies: William Congreve’s The Way of the World, and now, in a one-act double bill, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy.
“I like comedy,” asserts Shara, dispelling conceptions of Soulpepper as committed exclusively to the serious side of the theatrical canon. “The specificity of it provides a greater challenge than drama, which is more open to interpretation. In comedy, either you get the response or you don’t.”
This means Shara’s summer has been full of physical rehearsals which, like those of a dance troupe or track team, stress the hitting of marks, the getting of precise results. Shaffer’s farce is the inescapable curiosity here. Its hero, and Shara’s role, is Brimsley, a penniless London sculptor who hosts a dinner party in order to impress his spoiled, spinny fiancé’s father, and to woo a noted art buyer interested in his work. Disaster strikes immediately when the lights go out because of a blown fuse, but the audience sees everything: Shaffer flip-turns our perspective, brightening the lights in proportion to the degree to which his characters are bathed in darkness. (When a match is lit, for instance, the lights dim a little.)
“It’s draining,” says Shara about rehearsals. “I’ve worn knee and elbow pads the whole time, from day one. When you’re falling over and sliding down the stairs and tripping over things, it’s obviously a lot of hit and miss; your body takes a beating. But I relish it: sometimes you go through a few hours when it feels about as funny as an open sore, but you have to slow it all down, make it all make sense before you put it back together at full speed.”
Another part of Shara’s job is not to interfere too much with Shaffer’s farce, which, true to its genre, gets laughs from the situation it presents, and not from jokes that come directly, or rather intentionally, from its characters’ mouths. “Somebody’s got to be having the potential disasters, and that’s him,” Shara says of Brimsley. “It has to be very real for him. It’s not my job to comment on things, to try to show anybody how clever I can be. My job is just to do the things [Shaffer] says [Brimsley] does — to live them and to try to make them convincing. This is what gives the comedy its heart. Otherwise it gets callow and you get distanced from it; your appreciation becomes almost Presbyterian or something. You want people to be involved.”
Given its ingenious gimmick, Shaffer’s play is destined to do just this. Even its cheaper jokes — one character, Miss Furnival, is a teetotaler who takes a swig of alcohol in the dark of Brimsley’s apartment and likes what she tastes — will probably come off as perfectly placed. “Yeah, it’s an amazing thing, isn’t it? Audiences for farces can get on such a roll that the cheapness doesn’t matter,” says Shara. “It’s all about their willingness to have a good time. That’s what we’re hoping for. That they’ll want to bite. That they’ll go for it.”