As a venue, the expansive informality of the restaurant atmosphere within On Broadway provides a perfect platform for the staging of British playwright John Godber’s outrageous comedy, Bouncers. There’s something appealing about watching a play that explores the dynamics of nightclub culture in a performance space smack in the midst of Cape Town clubland.
Thematically, Bouncers offers its audience a remarkably in-depth comedic look at the world of nightclub revelry. Small wonder that Godber has been described as the Steven Berkoff of the bar. His almost-crass comedy ensures that people are able to identify with the familiar routines of familiar characters while being struck by the inherent absurdity of the situations in which these characters find themselves.
The success of Godber’s play lies in his ingeniously undisguised observations of four bouncers who introduce us to how their clientele behave before, during and after a visit to the club. There’s the exhilarating expectation and anticipation of the night ahead manifesting itself in that simple human need to look good by getting one’s hair done. Or there’s the euphoric sense of possibility at the prospect (or lack thereof) of that big night out … How many of us acknowledge those great moments when we spot someone across a crowded room and think, “Oh, this it it!” only to find the “desirable” object of our attention either drunk, or obnoxious, or just plain, goddamn ugly?
Directed and produced by Fred Abrahamse and Charl-Johan Lingenfelder – the talented team whose previous musical successes include the smash hit Abba(ish) – Godber’s witty, fast- paced script benefits from a seamless directorial touch, allowing the fantastic foursome (Heinrich Reisenhofer, Donal Slemon, Rob van Vuuren and Anton Smuts) to indulge their personal comic capabilities to the max. The success of Bouncers pivots upon the fact that these four actors understand the difference between comedic characterisation and mere comic caricature.
The demands of playing multiple characters are rigorous in that each cast member is required to use voice and gesture alone to switch from drunken lager-lout to trashy club tart and back to bouncer again.
The truly hilarious moments, that make me laugh just thinking about them, include Slemon’s switch from hardass bouncer to desperate party girl and Smuts’s transformation from serious sod, to “Suzie – sexy, but still shy”, the club slut. Both are delightful in their Carry On movie-like campness. Likewise, Van Vuuren’s Jim Carrey- esque facial contortions, particularly in the perfectly choreographed slow-motion action sequences where bouncers and drunken clubgoers clash. These had a hysterical audience begging for more.
However, while many of Bouncers’ bellylaughs are spawned by the rapid-fire role switches between tarted up gals or pissed lads, it is when the bouncers begin to unravel themselves that the audience starts identifying with more universal, less one-dimensional character traits. As much as Sexy Suzie the club slut has a story to tell, it is earnest Lucky Eric, the philosophical bouncer – played by Reisenhofer with wonderfully understated circumspection – who more than any other character ponders what the hell is going on around him. (Yep, bouncers are human beings too.)
By the time Eric has completed his “fourth and final speech”, the audience is not only drawn into an appreciation of the comedy but also of the very human desire for weekend oblivion and the tangible emotions of hope, frustration and self-loathing that make Bouncers such stimulating entertainment.