THEATRE: Andrew Wilson
ACTORS Greg Melville-Smith and Karin van der Laag deserve medals, not only for excellent performances, but for coping every night for an hour and a half with visionless direction and a clich-infested script.
As the first tangible production from the Civic Theatre’s 1996 New Stages project, Please Hold I’m Coming, written by Thandi Brewer and directed by Melinda Ferguson, has its heart in the right place but its mind rooted in TV.
Courtesy some static, cumbersome direction, the play is like watching the same two shots from a TV soap, with glimmers of reality and humanity providing brief respite from two stereotypical characters in a contrived situation.
The sex-phone worker has a weight problem and a complex to match, and finds her release and livelihood in “erotic” telephone chats. The accountant who calls her is on the verge of divorce and despair, and doesn’t want chat – he wants to know the real person.
The real person wants to avoid a meeting and a shattering of illusion. Finally they meet, and forgoing old habits, make a compromise exchange of snails for banana pizza. Clearly, a meeting of minds.
Travelling backwards from that, we encounter the usual array of premature ejaculators, paedophilic dominees and a series of arguments that belong within the safe arena of a TV chat-show.
Like The Bold the the Beautiful, the play places us within a framework of what we already know and believe in from our previous slave-master relationship with television. And leaves us there.
At one of the emotional peaks, the accountant becomes so agitated by his obsession with the phone-girl that he writes the word “obsession” on the wall. Is this the way a pen-pusher expresses himself, or is this a volcanic subtext erupting on to the wall?
If there is an edge of danger, desperation or darkness to this relationship, it is so muted as to become superficial; something that didn’t seem to bother the surprisingly middle-aged audience who grinned and ginned their way to the sunset denoument.
Two impressive performances and some good dialogue and that’s it.
Please Hold, I’m Coming is at the Civic Theatre until November 2