At 8pm on Saturday, a motley crew of thesps, budding directors and writers, met up in the White Rabbit pub to begin their mission: crafting, rehearsing and putting on a play, all in twenty-four hours. The brainstorming began with thoughts of a Shakespeare medley – but this seemed to carry on too much from last year’s expedited version of the Comedy of Errors. Eventually discussions turned to the idea of villains, getting under their skin and seeing stories from their point of view for a change. Rehearsals started in the morning on Sunday and the result was performed in Brasenose College at 8pm the next day.
I’m told the play, in its initial stages, was meant to be “a lot darker”; this surprises me as the whole thing was laugh-out-loud funny. Cruella DeVille (Ella Waldman) is first introduced on video, adding a high-tech edge to the production. She explains the main premise of the plot: villains are invited to join De Ville’s Villain Rehabilitation Centre, learning what they had done wrong in order to get killed the first time round. Invited to rehab sessions at “The Satanic Mill, Gingerbread Street, Mordor”, classic Gaston, Captain Hook, Ursula, the Evil Queen and Scar congregate in an Alcoholics-Anonymous-style circle of chairs, and hilarity ensues as each of them tells their story of failed villainy.
Twenty-four hours – “more like 5 hours” of rehearsing proper, retorts Waldman – is clearly long enough for this improvised team of thesps to produce some seriously funny parodies. Captain Hook (Tim Gibson) is made incredibly camp and excitable, Gaston (Nick Lyons) is hugely confident with a tendency to burst into song at several intervals, and Scar is delightfully bitter and twisted about his failure to “kill the kid!” Cruella’s advice to them is to avoid high places (this is especially relevant to the Evil Queen, played by Ellie Page, from Snow White) and never trust anyone.
Katie Ebner-Landy, president of OUDS, said this year was the first time video was incorporated. The technological element is likely to develop more year by year, and special effects are surely not that far off in the future.
Griffith Rees doubles up as director and the charming and frighteningly accurate voice-over of Mickey Mouse, whom Cruella phones during a break to consider the villains’ propensities to appear in a sequel. The more profound element of the play is discovered here: a commentary on two-faced corporatism and how it uses personalities for the entertainment of the masses. This comes back to bite Cruella as her rehab patients rebel at the end, refusing to sign contracts for Disney sequels, following her very own villain lessons: number 2 “Don’t trust anyone”.
The writing was fresh, perhaps because of its immediacy and rapid inception, and the stock characters provided by Disney provided a good base for original comedy. In a drama scene where improvisation is the realm of just one comedy group – the Imps – fast-paced improvisational initiatives such as the 24-hour play should be encouraged and rewarded.
