80 MINUTES NO INTERVAL
80 MINUTES NO INTERVAL, Thread Entertainment in association with Red Line Productions at the Old Fitz, 11 March-9 April 2016. Photography by Rupert Reid: above - Ryan Johnson; right: Ryan Johnson and Sheridan Harbridge.
Written and directed by Travis Cotton, this is that rare and welcome beast: a comedy that’s actually truly-rooly funny. More than that – and would you believe it – it runs for precisely 80 minutes, no interval and packs a world of satire and sass into that time frame.
Louis (Ryan Johnson) is an aspiring novelist who meanwhile makes a living as a theatre critic (first hint of farce: cue weary groans and laughs from the critics in the room). He’s meeting his girlfriend Claire (Sheridan Harbridge) at a posh restaurant in order to propose. Before this can happen he offends the waiter (Jacob Allen) and drives them both bonkers with his OCD attitude to the menu.
Then Claire delivers the key to the evening – a list of everything she’s hated about the six years of purgatory spent at his side in theatres. It’s Sheridan Harbridge at her best: rapid-fire, witty, sly, intelligent and painfully funny. The playwright goes on to serve up each and every one of those cliches but first has Louis fired from his job as a critic by his odious editor (Robin Goldsworthy) and replaced by a tiny red box. It’s actually a robot that writes better and with more insight and humanity than the human.
However, as well as many deliciously self-aware and satirical theatre jokes, Cotton also finds time and place to examine the paralysing trap of chasing perfection and the utter seriousness of comedy. Modern publishing gets a serve too with the importance of Twitter and shifting units – forget books – passionately espoused by publisher Dan Kurtz (Goldsworthy again) who advises moving the novel’s setting from Seattle grunge and Nirvana to Sydney and Kylie Minogue and Natalie Imbruglia.
What happens next – because of course it has also been revealed by Louis’s parents that he’s been cursed from birth – is utterly ridiculous but also makes perfect sense in context and in the world Cotton has created. A significant part of this world is the incidental music and a soundscape that has a clever and hilarious scene all to itself (Hamish Michael with composer Hue Blanes).
By the time Louis wanders out of his life’s valley of despair into a sumptuously filled florist’s shop belonging to Mathilde (Julia Rorke, with set design by Georgia Hopkins, lighting Ross Graham) he and the audience are equally bemused and bewildered by the passing of time and the misadventures he’s suffered. The only things missing are the actual slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – he’s endured pretty much everything else.
The cast, led by a charming Ryan Johnson and directed by the playwright, brings a light touch and intelligent sense of grounded commitment to the absurd and the farcical. It has the effect of making plausible just about everything Cotton throws in, although the idea of a publisher being given a state funeral is a stretch too far – and therefore very funny.
All in all, 80 Minutes No Interval is a delight and clever and thoughtful with it. Definitely recommended.
