The Unfriend

This new play by Steven Moffat is a contemporary comedy of manners which focuses on the British obsession with the avoidance of confrontation.  The central character, Elsa Krakowski, is a wealthy widow from the United States, and she persuades a British couple she meets on a cruise to give her their email address.  It is a decision that the couple in question, Peter and Debbie Lindel, come to regret.

In her programme note the director correctly recognises the importance of making the characters real.  It’s not an easy task.  “The Unfriend” is not a typical farce in that it broadly lacks slapstick and innuendo, but any drama that features a suburban householder waving a soiled toilet brush in the face of a policeman is a farce at some level.  There are echoes here of that classic comedy of embarrassment, “Fawlty Towers”, and I think most people would accept that Basil Fawlty was barely rooted in reality.  There’s even a touch of Mary Poppins about the plot, as the larger-than-life Elsa parachutes into the Lindels’ home and wreaks an astonishing transformation in their two teenage children.  The points of reference make it almost inevitable that the characters are going to be somewhat exaggerated, but the cast succeeded in making them believable.

The standard of the sets at The Corn Exchange is reliably high, and this one was particularly impressive in its ingenuity and in the quality of the set dressing.  A stub wall extending forwards from the back of the set allowed the acting area to be divided into a kitchen and living room, and incorporate a front door, a back door, that critical downstairs cloakroom and a sixties stairwell leading up to a landing and further hidden stairs.  The kitchen was fully fitted, there were mugs and glasses on the shelves, and Peter Lindel could even enjoy his beer cold as the fridge light came on when the door was opened.  An interesting feature of the set was the provision of large display screens each side of the stage, which proved invaluable for displaying Elsa’s video call to the Lindels as well as some of the online material about her.  The video call was particularly well realised – I can only think that it was pre-recorded, but the timing of the conversational exchange was spot on – and the featured mugshots of Elsa were wonderfully unflattering.

This play is a popular choice for amateur dramatic groups at the moment, and it’s not difficult to understand why.  Holiday acquaintances, passive-aggressive neighbours and difficult teenagers are familiar to most of us, and these characters keep the play rooted firmly in the real world.  But a stage comedy of manners is not the real world: it is a world of exaggeration and excess, a world in which the things we might normally try to conceal have to be brought out into the open before we attempt, without subtlety, to hide them away.  In the Venn diagram of dramatic interpretation there isn’t a great deal of overlap between the circles of reality, humour and embarrassment, but the Sinodun Players got pretty close to the sweet spot with this production.  It pushed the boundaries of reality as it had to, but it was well-observed, immaculately staged and consistently, if sometimes cringingly amusing.

© NODA CIO.  All rights reserved.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.