Playing for laughs

FlatSpin
Canberra Rep at Theatre 3. Until March 20.
Reviewer: Glenn Burns

Canberra Rep has opened its 2010 season with a highly entertaining and energetically performed production of Alan Ayckbourn's 2001 comedy thriller FlatSpin.

Ayckbourn began his career over 40 years ago with a series of finely crafted and increasingly bleak comedies exploring the fragility of middle class domestic existence. However, with FlatSpin, he gives us what is basically a farce, though a farce enlivened with some inventive dialogue with a rich supply of sexual innuendo as well as some amusing byplay about the vagaries of theatrical life.

Ayckbourn builds his plot of multiple misunderstandings from the attempt of out-of-work actor, Rosie Seymour, to impress a male neighbour, Sam, by impersonating the absentee tenant of a London Docklands apartment. To this potential for romantic confusion are added the more sinister revelations that the tenant does not exist and that microphones and surveillance cameras are planted throughout the apartment.

Though this is perhaps not among the very best of Ayckbourn's plays - logic tends to play second fiddle to comic potential and some elements seem better suited to a different style of play - the sleight-of-hand plotting keeps producing laughs - and any writer who can engineer a joke out of Handel's Zadok the Priest is entitled to be considered a master of comic construction.

Geoff_[sic] Borny's beautifully judged production sets out the farcical foundations of Ayckbourn's plot so firmly that the audience is always clear about what it is being confused about, as it were. More importantly, Borny has gathered together a cast which has a real understanding of how to make people laugh. Lainie Hart and Ross Walker prove very likeable leads while Jerry Hearn as Maurice keeps hitting the right notes in playing around with stereotypes of British officialdom. Steph Roberts as the comic monster of a property manager and Rob de Fries as the super-fit but super-crazy bodyguard are both hilarious in brief roles.

Andrew Kay's set uses Theatre 3's broad stage to great effect. The set is perfectly suited to the demands of the play - sufficiently uncluttered as to allow the actors to unfold the farce but also, in its muted grey tones and well chosen furnishings, nicely suggestive of the pretensions to a luxury of an apartment belonging to an area described by one character as a "yuppy zone".

Ayckbourn's plays, though always essentially comic, are often acutely observant of human behaviour. FlatSpin is less concerned with the human condition than with the sheer pleasure of comic invention and this excellent production will make you laugh. A lot.