Comedy is a serious business, says Paul Kloegman director of the latest White Rock Players Club offering, Ladies of the Camellias (April 6-23, Coast Capital Playhouse).
He acknowledges he is known as something of a specialist in the field, both as a director – for such plays as last year’s Twentieth Century and Humble Boy at the Coast Capital, Up and Coming at Vancouver’s Metro Theatre and his most recent assignment, Norman, Is That You? for the New Westminster’s Vagabond Players – and as the proprietor of a professional troupe, the Comedy Company, which has been doing corporate gigs for the past 20 years.
But that doesn’t mean he’s an aficionado of coarse attempts to “be funny.”
“I tell my actors ‘do not try to make the play funny,’” he said. “Let the lines speak for themselves.”
As a Briton by birth – Shepherd’s Bush, London, to be exact – the award-winning Kloegman has an affinity for the dry style of such television classics as John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, even though the shows’ characters and situations, in themselves, were abundantly absurd.
“If you look at a program like Fawlty Towers, they were playing it dead straight,” he said. “And in Blackadder, there’s nothing funnier than watching someone else react to the funny things – Blackadder’s own reactions to all the other characters for example.”
There’s plenty of scope for this approach in Lillian Garrett-Groag’s Ladies of the Camellias, a comedic fantasy about a potential meeting between theatrical divas Sarah Berhardt (Nancy Ebert) and Eleanora Duse (Lori Tych) in Paris in 1897.
Their attempts to upstage each other with two different versions of Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camellias (also known as Camille) are complicated by their egotistical co-stars Gustave Hippolite Worms (Jason Dedrick) and Flavio Ando (Ryan Johnston), and a Russian anarchist, Ivan, who threatens to blow up the theatre (Stephen Benjamin Fowler).
Add in the playwright himself (Gerard Ponsford); an ingenue (Alexandra Wilson); Benoit, the aged caretaker and prompter (Ken Fynn) and the apparent incarnation of fictional hero Cyrano de Bergerac (Brent Cross) and you have a recipe for chaos that, in some hands, could go right over the top.
But Kloegman said he is playing down broad characterizations.
“We’re playing it relatively naturalistically,” he said.
“It is basically a farce – but it’s a very controlled farce.”
There is actually a thin thread of history underpinning the comedy, he said.
“Virtually all the characters were real people.”
It appears the very flamboyant and French Bernhardt and the pouty, dramatic and very Italian Duse – were in Paris at the same time in the late 1890s, Duse temporarily without a venue for her touring version of La Dame aux Camellias, which Berhardt was currently playing at her own Theatre de la Renaissance.
“Apparently Sarah lent the theatre to Duse so that she could perform her show there in the afternoon, and Sarah would perform it that evening,” Kloegman said.
“In reality, they never met, but they hated each other anyway. This play is really a fictitious ‘what if’.”
It’s one that has given playwright Garrett-Groag plenty of opportunity to indulge in inside jokes about the theatre – such as discussion of the necessity of having a director, a new concept for performers like Bernhardt and Duse.
More inside humour comes from the reaction of Dumas to the leading ladies’ interpretations of his play.
“He likes them well enough, but he bemoans the fact that they never say their lines the way he wrote them,” Kloegman said. “All they care about is how they look on stage.”
Also adding to the fun will be the characters of the pompous leading men Worms and Ando.
“They both think they’re God’s gift to women – and they’re not,” Kloegman said.
But of particular benefit to the show is having accomplished actresses Ebert and Tych in the leading roles, Kloegman said.
“We’re having great fun – I have a very hard-working cast,” he added.
“It should be a great evening of theatre.”
For tickets, call 604-536-7545, or reserve online at www.whiterockplayers.ca