Black Swan injects technicolour into the program

There’s been a lot of dark theatre staged around the traps lately. Period pieces doused in disaster and war, love-gone-AWOL, dirty lies and law-breaking. Don’t get us wrong – we revel in watching a bit of drama and tragedy on the big stage. But it is nice when a comical production breaks up the bleakness – albeit one with a deep message, but still very funny. Such comic relief is very much needed in an age when we already see enough war and sad stuff on the telly. Theatre has a certain responsibility, after all, to assist us in ‘escaping’ – and so why shouldn’t it deliver a little slapstick and cerebral comedy as anaesthetic means? Thank goodness, then, for the Black Swan State Theatre Company’s latest production, Laughter On The 23rd Floor – a show that is so right for right now.

A rollicking take on the classic Neil Simon story, Laughter… is set in the early 1950s, just when television started to really take off in America; it’s surge in popularity suddenly pin-pricked by communist-related paranoia.

Back then, US Senator Joe McCarthy insisted on a theory that show business was being plagued by writers and actors who held communist agendas – creative types supposedly using their talent to subliminally infiltrate American culture with left-wing politic via right-wing-funded media. Even the makers of primetime TV comedy are branded potential ‘pinkos’, and when one particular show is threatened with cancellation, the chaos that ensues is both haphazard and hilarious.

The host of ‘The Max Prince Show’ is played ever-so-brilliantly by Peter Rowsthorn (aka: Bretty from Kath & Kim) who brings just the right balance of slapstick action and mind-boggling rhetoric to the role. While Rowsthorn’s ‘Max’ fights for the integrity of his show – once packed with highbrow intellect and wit – his constant battling leads to a wariness and weakness that result in even his one-liners descending into ‘dumber and dumber’ territory.

While Max tries to smash through the pinko conspiracy – physically as well as metaphorically (he literally punches holes through the studio walls), his fighting only fuels the distortion of it all. In short, Max grows as insane as the theories initially put forward by McCarthy, all the while his writers and producers are trying to keep both him and the scatty remains of their show together.

While the majority of characters speak in fast-talkin’-all-American-know-how accents – a tactic that often falls flat on Australian audiences (when we just know an ocker accent is begging to slip out), in this show you really don’t mind all the yackety-yak. Actually, it’s less yackety and more hell-yeah if you can keep up with the non-stop smart-ass dialogue.

Hats off to fresh WAAPA graduate, James Sweeny, who plays narrator Lucas Brickman (apparently representing writer Neil Simon himself), for he perfectly bookends one very fast-paced show while maintaining his own role as a key player. Sweeney opens the show with a clear-cut description of its setting – just in case the audience thought it had accidentally stepped onto the set of ‘Mad Men’ (the props and backdrops are that cool) and then summarises the plot and all its predecessor antics – in the most sensible-sized nutshell he can find amid all the maelstrom.

Set Designer Lauren Ross and Artistic Director Kate Cherry must have had a field day putting together this show. With all its modern furnishings and postmodern meanderings, Laughter On The 23rd Floor is as much a necessary injection of glorious technicolour for their CVs as it is for the Perth theatre scene.  Antonino Tati

‘Laughter On The 23rd Floor’ is on at the Heath Ledger Theatre until September 21. Tickets available through www.bsstc.com.au or www.ticketek.com.au.

Poster photography by Robert Frith.

Stage photography by Gary Marsh.