What could be a better escape from seventh week drudgery than a visit to 1960’s New York? Or rather, a couple of hours in the Pilch Studio with newlyweds Corrie and Paul Bratter, as they try to navigate marriage, apartment-dwelling and the neighbours not quite from hell, but not necessarily from the right side of sanity either…
After a week of intensive sounding honeymooning “at the Plaza”, the couple appear during the opening scene to have been thrust violently into the realities of urban domesticity. The inadequacies of the apartment, with its shattered skylight, no heating and position on the sixth floor, fall thick and fast as the snow outside, from the lips of the practical Paul (Alexander McDonald) onto the upturned face of the ever-optimistic Corrie (Sarah Geraghty). There is believable frisson between these two, with Geraghty constantly seeming to orbit McDonald when they are onstage together, swooping in with a shy smile for hugs and kisses at endearingly inopportune moments. While their tender episodes are somewhat evocative of infatuated teenagers snogging behind a bike shed as opposed to married adults, this is reflective of Enni-Kukka Tuomala’s commitment to conveying the nature of society and the decade, in which Corrie and Paul, living together as newlyweds are stepping into new, unchartered and in this case farcical terrain.
It must be said that none of the cast seem sufficiently cold nor out of breath considering the number of gags in the (determinedly light-hearted script) about the mountainous amount of stairs and the lack of heating once one’s climbed them. All four parts in the play are approached with a sensitivity which puts real characters behind lines and they have the potential to be alternatively one-dimensionally witty or saccharine. Julia Hamilton as Corrie’s mother maintains a fantastic sense of subtext as she tempers horrified incredulity with Waspish poise, claiming too often and too adamantly to “love” the apartment. Her part requires her to draw comedy out of the lines by the way she says them, making it a more difficult one than that of bizarre neighbour Velasco (Henry Cockburn), whose lines are inherently funny. Cockburn brings a pleasing wackiness to the role however, as he strides invasively around the apartment complete with an ever-twirling cane, his English accent emphasising the impressive American efforts of the other three. This comic cocktail could benefit from slightly fine-tuning its staging, (which lacked definition and at times meant that expressive faces were obscured) but is nevertheless a great alternative pick-me-up to a real one.
3 STARS
