The play Success uses the backstage world of funnymen to explore betrayal, plagiarism and the price of fame
Playwright Stephen Sinclair and comedian Jeremy Elwood have joined forces to produce a play about the world of stand-up comedy and the ramifications of success.
Simply called Success, it comes to Auckland next week after a successful debut at Wellington’s Bats Theatre. They hope to take it to other New Zealand centres and maybe the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
But Sinclair says Success nearly didn’t get written. When his friend Peter Murphy, of comedy outfit Funny Business, suggested the idea he didn’t see the potential in a story about stand-up comedians.
But the more he let the idea percolate, the more he realised the world of stand-up was an ideal backdrop to explore betrayal, plagiarism, the tallpoppy syndrome and fame.
Sinclair says the essence of the story is all the more believable, given New Zealand performers are making it big overseas.
“The writer Gore Vidal said, ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’ so it explores how friendships alter and the nature of being in this sort of business. I wanted to combine the discipline of stand-up comedy with theatrical performance; I like to add an extra ingredient into naturalistic theatre and this seemed a good mix.”
He had already written Success when he saw 7 Days funnyman and actor Jeremy Elwood in The Slapdash Assassin at The Basement. Elwood agreed to take one of the three lead roles alongside Stephen Papps and John Glass but he wanted to rewrite some of the stand-up comedy scenes.
“I think a lot of people who write stand-up think it’s a lot more polished than it is,” says Elwood. “It was quite good fun to write a stand-up rou- tine based on someone else’s idea for a character who has quite a different point of view from my own.
“It’s not Jeremy Elwood in a play about stand-up comedians that someone else has written. My character, Carl, is quite different from me; he’s an amalgamation of other types of comedians and has, I think, far more bluster.” Sinclair, who wrote or co-wrote the comedy classics Ladies Night, The Bach and The Sex Fiend, welcomed input from Elwood, Papps and Glass, saying it was a challenge to write stand-up routines for each of the characters to perform during the play.
He says Success needed actors who had a natural comic style and the nerve to do believable and individualised standup routines. It centres around three stand-up comedians (Carl, Jules and Derek) who started out together sharing dreams, ideas and a flat before Carl moved to America and made it big. In the play, Carl returns to New Zealand after 10 years, with the media in hot pursuit of a story about an unforgivable act he may have committed.
“I don’t think I’d ever have the nerve [to perform stand-up comedy]. I think I could write a certain kind of stand-up routine but I’m not sure I could deliver it. I did quite a lot of research on stand-up comedy; watching clips on YouTube where there’s an endless supply of clips you can refer to. I came to the conclusion that successful stand-up comedy is mainly about performance and, in some ways, the material isn’t as important as the delivery.”
Sinclair, who worked with Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh on a number of films including The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, is now kicking off a new screenwriting project.
He’s scripting a kung-fu historical epic for a Chinese-New Zealand coproduction.