AISLE SAY Toronto

THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP:
A Penny Dreadful


by Charles Ludlam
Directed by Aaron Mark
Starring Bill Bowers and Tom Hewitt

Berkshire Theatre Festival
Fitzpatrick Main Stage, June 28-July 19

Reviewed by Joel Greenberg

 

Thank you, BTG, for enlivening the season by producing The Mystery of Irma Vep: a Penny Dreadful, the campy pseudo-Gothic-cum-everything-else theatrical romp written in the mid-1980’s by the late Charles Ludlam. Created for both himself and his partner, Everett Quinton, Irma Vep references Victorian melodrama, Gothic thrillers, vampires, Shakespeare, Hitchcock and a battery of shamefully unapologetic one-liners, both crude and less crude. If it’s consistency of style or tone that you favour, well, forget it and go to see for yourself what unadorned showmanship is all about.

 

In the course of two hours, the two actors – in this production we are blessed by having Bill Bowers and Tom Hewitt – play a variety of characters and don full costume for each. And the costumes, designed by Wade Laboissonniere, are dead-on in their imitation of what the originals might have been, plus enough tongue-in-cheek to complement Ludlam’s fondness for the way-too-much.

 

Bowers and Hewitt are remarkably agile in voice, body and spirit. Their chemistry warms the audience early on and draws laughter that builds from moment to moment. And though it’s Ludlam who provides the platform, it is the actors who use the script as a launching pad for their own inexhaustible store of tricks – and tricks in the very best sense of the word. In fact, the script promises more than it delivers and takes longer than it should to dive into the insanity and inanity that makes for such an enjoyable evening. But then, the script was written thirty years ago and at a time when this off-off Broadway enterprise was something of a rarity that has, over time, become a cult classic. I’m guessing that what was audacious and tacky in its original format and setting, has become cleaned up for a wider public. That’s not a criticism – but it helps to know the play’s origins when watching it today.

 

BTG has stepped outside its more typical programming, and that’s all to the better. And hearing this audience laugh at most of the references and all of the asides was further encouragement that productions needn’t be entirely familiar beforehand – people are willing to buy tickets to what they couldn’t have known and leave delighted to have made a new discovery. Irma Vep, with its inside theatre and film jokes, could easily lapse into an us-them experience. Happily, that is not the case here and for that we applaud.

 

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