HOLIDAY FUN (WITH A BIT ON THE SIDE!)
No surprises but plenty of fooling around in this fast-paced, sexy comedy
SHOW OF
THE WEEK Looking At The Sun Smock Alley
Until Sept 3 ★★★★★
This new play by American writer Emily Bohannon isn’t quite ‘hilarious’ but it’s an entertaining fastpaced sex comedy directed with flair and imagination by Kathleen Warner Yeates. It has ambitions to be something more profound but it manages to steer clear of anything that’s too pretentious as it portrays the summer vacation of an American family going through that dreaded obligatory ordeal known as ‘having fun together’.
Philosophising father, Ronald, who has never quite grown up, is here with wife Ronalda to relive the joys of his childhood in a beach house on the east coast of America. His idea of bliss is to go power walking in the early morning, do some fishing, breathe in a lot of sea air and sample the joys of cotton candy (candy floss to you and me).
His wife Ronalda spends most of her time exhausted and sleeping: their children are bored and rebellious, especially about their father’s past memories and the need to spell out the experience rated ‘the summer of your life’.
On holiday with them are the under-sexed Bernie and his oversexed wife Tabitha (former Off The Rails presenter Caroline Morahan) who fancy setting up a sexy threesome. Former friend Vaughan, now divorced and depressed, seeks comfort in private conversations with his non-existent new love but is willing to take on something more physical.
And two touring young Australians, gay Michael and straight Michael, practically
become members of the family in their desire to experience ‘the real America’ they believe this American group will provide.
Bohannon has written of her admiration for the plays of Oscar Wilde and Alan Ayckbourn, and there’s a element of their influence in the play: the fast comic repartee, and Ayckbourn’s habit of delivering deceptive humour that unexpectedly leads to nasty revelations.
But the serious emotional aspects of the play are pretty obvious from the beginning and work their way out in comic situations without major surprises.
The comedy is in the snappy dialogue and the mood changes brought about by the sexual pickand-mixing involving all the adults in unlikely permutations (nothing explicit).
‘It has ambitions to be profound but avoids being too pretentious’
The Australians come across as a bit of an add-on to expand the humour and the philosophical aspects, and it eventually runs out of steam, but the American and Irish cast of nine work together with precision in a generally enjoyable evening.
■ Smock Alley, until Saturday, 7pm, and Saturday/Sunday, 2.30pm. Civic Theatre Tallaght, September 6-10, 8pm, and Saturday, 3pm.