A wacky ROMP THAT HITS THE SWEET SPOT
Zany, frenetic and full of laughs, All Honey will light up your dull January
‘In best sitcom mode, people come and go leaving the situation more and more fraught’
All Honey Bewley’sCaféTheatre Until Jan 27 HHHHH
All Honey is in direct line from all those other sitcoms and madcap comedies that have skipped their way through misapprehensions, revelations, hidden indiscretions and every other twist and turn of outraged and deceitful lovers; all with no ulterior motive other than to get the audience laughing.
This latest in the line, that first appeared in the 2017 Fringe, takes a slightly different tack.
It’s not so much a situation comedy, as a piece of verbal sitcom in which awkward situations are discussed at breakneck speed.
Here, the spoken word dominates, not the activity.
It demands and gets split-second timing from the cast of five, an unusually high number for Bewley’s.
And it all take place in the box room of a house where couple Luke and Ru are holding a house-warming.
The small room becomes a kind of refuge where people burst in with their worries, apprehensions and revelations.
Mae (a splendidly neurotic Ashleigh Dorrell) suspects that her beloved Barry is having an affair.
The sensible Ru downplays the situation while nonetheless picking up some of Mae’s paranoid suspicions herself.
In best sitcom mode, people come and go leaving the situation more fraught and the suspicions mounting. There’s much talk of the machinations of Val (the writer of the play, Ciara Elizabeth Smyth) a marauding vamp who unashamedly delights in her amorous triumphs. The smirking and eversmiling hulk Barry (Keith Jordan) causes even more confusion by involving the dumbstruck Luke in his efforts to absolve himself from blame. And who and what exactly is the unseen Jen who seems to have a hold over the neurotic Mae? All exits and entrances are through the one door into the wellnamed box-room that’s littered with multi-coloured shapes and boxes.
There’s a brief attempt at the end to veer away from the pure zaniness of the situation, but fortunately, it never really strays from what is essentially unpretentious fun.
Direction by Jeda de Bri is as pacy as the delivery by the cast.