A fast-paced, inventive and gloriously silly homage to Casablanca
Theatre Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut Òran Mór, Glasgow
Since it was established by the late producer David Maclennan in 2004, the immensely successful lunchtime theatre programme A Play, a Pie and a Pint at Glasgow’s Òran Mór has presented more than
400 mini-dramas. But few have enjoyed greater audience and critical acclaim than Casablanca: The Gin Joint
Cut, writer/director Morag Fullarton’s affectionate, comic homage to Michael Curtiz’s famous movie, which premiered in 2011. Having since played to packed audiences at the Edinburgh fringe and Paris’s Théâtre Déjazet, it returns now as an evening entertainment at its former home. A fabulously funny retelling of the Second World War thriller, it should have more legs in it yet.
By way of introduction, we are treated to an appetiser of Forties songs – including, of course, As Time Goes By
– sung by the fine-voiced chanteuse Jerry Burns. However, as Ms Burns nears the end of her short set, the sight of half-naked actor Gavin Mitchell wandering across the stage, a steam iron in one hand, a pair of trousers in the other, is a sign of things to come.
Much of the humour derives from the play’s lo-fi recreation of the film, with Mitchell and his fellow actors Clare Waugh and Jimmy Chisholm playing numerous characters. Chisholm’s frenetic costume changes make for particularly delightful comedy; culminating in the hilarious scene in which he plays disreputable police chief Captain Renault and the Resistance hero Victor Laszlo at the same time. Waugh is similarly brilliant as she cuts improbably between romantic heroine Ilsa Lund and the menacing Nazi, Major Strasser.
Meanwhile Mitchell is outstanding as Rick Blaine, the heartbroken American trying to see out the war by running a gin joint and gambling den in Morocco. Assisted by his trusty pianist Sam (well, a small, wooden statue of Sam), Mitchell offers a deliciously exaggerated parody of Humphrey Bogart’s performance.
Fast-paced, inventive and gloriously silly, this slick farce also manages, somehow, to tell the story of love, espionage and the fight for liberty with some sincerity – and leaves the audience cheering it to the rafters.